(Fwd) David Harvey's free online course - The Story of Capital - starts Sept 8; recent interview and book review
"Patrick Bond" <[email protected]>
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(A fantastic opportunity to join David at the height of his persuasive
power! Sign up here
<https://peoplesforum.org/events/virtual-course-the-story-of-capital-w-david-harvey/>.)
https://peoplesforum.org/events/virtual-course-the-story-of-capital-w-david-harvey/
VIRTUAL COURSE: The Story of Capital w/ David Harvey
September 8 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Join us for a public virtual livestream of Prof. David Harvey’s course
The Story of Capital. The course entails a close reading of the recent
book /The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know about How Capital
Works /by David Harvey.
For decades, David Harvey has been teaching Marx’s work, particularly
Capital, to great acclaim. He has analysed chapter by chapter –
sometimes line-by-line – Marx’s three volumes and the Grundrisse. This
new book opens up the mental universe of that work for a general reader.
In The Story of Capital, Harvey takes a synoptic approach to the
conceptual architecture as a whole and guides us through the key
moments, from labour and technology to the state and geopolitics, via
the profit rate, social reproduction, the relationship to nature,
fictitious capital and the return of the rentiers. In doing so, Harvey
has produced a work which will become a key reference for all those
trying to grasp the nature of contemporary capitalism.
*The course will run on Tuesdays from 4:15-6:15pm from September
8-December 1, 2026. *
*****
*David Harvey: Marxism and Capitalism*
*Doomscroll: Joshua Citarella and the Whitney Museum of American Art *
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDs9XAZx9M
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDs9XAZx9M>
July 28, 2026
My guest is David Harvey, a scholar, geographer and social theorist. He
is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has served on the
faculty of Johns Hopkins University and held the Halford Mackinder Chair
in Geography at the University of Oxford. Our conversation explores the
inequality and economic crises of the 21st century. What are the
defining features of this new era? What forces might intervene to
correct our faltering economic systems?
0 00 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDs9XAZx9M>Intro 1 27
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDs9XAZx9M&t=87s>End of history 5 04
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDs9XAZx9M&t=304s>Capitalism &
contradictions 9 34
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDs9XAZx9M&t=574s>Neoliberalism vs
monopoly 16 01
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDs9XAZx9M&t=961s>Automation vs growth
21 02 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDs9XAZx9M&t=1262s>Circulation &
consumption 24 49
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDs9XAZx9M&t=1489s>Theories of value
28 14 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDs9XAZx9M&t=1694s>Marx vs
Ricardo 36 10
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDs9XAZx9M&t=2170s>Neoclassical
economics 43 46
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDs9XAZx9M&t=2626s>Saving capitalism
48 05 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDs9XAZx9M&t=2885s>China vs USA
53 34 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWDs9XAZx9M&t=3214s>AI vs labour
Bottom of Form
*Intro *
/Welcome to Doomscroll. I’m your host Joshua Citerella. My guest is
David Harvey, a scholar, geographer, and social theorist. He is a
distinguished professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York. He has served on the faculty
of Johns Hopkins University and held the Halford Mackinder chair in
geography at the University of Oxford. David Harvey is the author of 29
books. His most recent work the story of capital explores the labour
technology and geopolitics of today. He has received the voterlude
international prize in geography, the Anders Retszia’s gold medal of the
Swedish society for anthropology and geography, the patrons medal of the
Royal Geographical Society, and many other awards. David Harvey is most
well known for his university course on Marx’s capital. For over 50
years, he has taught and studied these foundational texts. He is
considered by many to be the most influential Marxist scholar alive
today. This program is part of the 82nd Whitney biennial curated by
Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer at the Whitney Muse in New York City. /
/What was the end of history and how was Marxism understood in the ‘90s?/
*End of history*
Oh, well, I taught Marx’s /Kapital /every year at Johns Hopkins from
about 1971 onwards. And I would have sometimes you know 15 students in
the class, 20 students in the class. But during the 1990s of course, the
Cold War was over and everybody told me that Marx was dead. I was just a
dinosaur sort of teaching something that was totally irrelevant because
any ideas coming out of Marx were over.
So I ended up with about five students in my class most of whom were not
interested at all in Marx. They simply had to have a course from
humanities or something like that and they would come along and listen
and be very surprised. But then in the 1990s it was very difficult
teaching this stuff.
But this was odd because during the 1990s there was all this stuff going
on about the terrible employment conditions in the textile industries in
you know East Asia and Europe and Turkey and all the rest of it and
there were all these articles about you know terrible labour conditions.
So in fact you could pick up a copy of the New York Times and read a
whole passage about what was going on in the sweat shops of the world
which fitted entirely into chapter 10 of Marx’s Kapital on the working
day where he describes exactly these same conditions.
So I was in a situation in the 1990s of actually teaching a subject that
was far more relevant than it was in the 1970s but was far less
interesting to the mass of the population. So it was very strange by the
time you get towards the end of the 1990s it began to change a little.
And of course it changed a lot after 2008 when there was another crisis
and people started to say well maybe we should go look at that fellow
Marx again and so some interest came back. And now recently it’s been
less interest. So there’s a big sort of wavy way in which Marx comes on
the scene and off the scene.
But the 1990s was a very difficult period when it was assumed that
capitalism was dominant. All the struggles around the world have been
solved in favor of capital and that everything was going to work
according to the kind of market equilibrium theories that the economists
were working with at that time.
So it was it was a very difficult period and very annoying one and I set
my students the following task at the end of the semester which was to
say write imaginary letter to your parents at home saying you’re taking
this course on Marx’s Kapital and to your surprise it has a lot of
relevance to understanding the present situation when you would have
thought given end of the cold war. It was exactly the opposite.
So I suggested they write that. They wrote very nice papers. And then I
said to them, did you send it back to your parents? They said, “No, no,
no, no, no, no. We wouldn’t do that.” because there was still this
anathema for anything Marxist as it would be the end of the cold war.
*Capitalism and contradictions *
/You mentioned 2008 before. In an article, a recent article for Jacobin,
you write both Roosevelt and Keynes explicitly recognise that their aim
was to save capital from the capitalists. And I’m wondering what Marx
can tell us about the crisis of one the 1930s, but also the 2008
subprime mortgage crisis. What can Marx tell us that mainstream
economics can’t see?/
So for Marx the system is working on contradictions and one of the big
contradictions is that capitalists very much like the idea of
technological change and increasing the productivity of labour. This is
to their advantage and individual capitalists working on towards their
individual advantage push technological advances to to to a considerable
degree. in so doing of course they raise the productivity of labour but
therefore diminish the demand for labour.
So labour becomes less and less useful to them because its productivity
has become so high. And so one of the things that then happens is that
labour is pushed to one side. So that labour for instance was far more
important to the people of the world in the 1970s than it was in the
1990s because of the technological change.
What happens then is that individual capitalists working to maximise
their profit rate produce a technological mix which actually diminishes
the role of labour and if labour is the source of value then it also
diminishes the value which is circulating in society and the result is
that individual capitalists are destroying the basis of capitalism.
That’s essentially what’s happening and therefore there comes into
question: okay, if that’s the case, then somebody has to save capitalism
from the capitalists, and how do you do that?
And so that’s where we get you know policy and state interventions all
those sorts of things which become absolutely essential so when you get
a crisis then somebody realises this is the problem and so I cited both
Roosevelt and Keynes at some point or other both of them said they
needed to solve the problem of capitalism by actually attacking the
capitalists and trying to reshape what the capitalist class would do in
relationship to accumulation of capital as opposed to using the coercive
laws of competition and imagining everything would work well.
The coercive laws of competition are an example of a contradiction that
a contradiction in which individual capitalists working to maximise
their benefit actually produce a result which is antagonistic to a
future of capital accumulation. So this is the main dynamic which occurs
and occurs throughout the book in many different forms and you need to
have a good understanding of how this system works in order to manage
the contradictions.
The important thing about contradictions is that they never go away. It
can be simply managed and we’re having to manage contradictions all the
time and the contradictions of capital are central to what I talk about
in the book. There are many different contradictions.
For instance, there’s a contradiction between fixed capital and
interest-bearing capital and circulating capital. one is trying to go
faster and faster. Fixed capital is going slower and slower. There’s a
contradiction between between investment and fixed capital and we see
that going on all the time and those contradictions are there. They have
to be confronted and they have to be managed properly.
But most of the time bourgeois science doesn’t really understand
contradictions and doesn’t like to talk about contradictions. So as Mark
said about Ricardo, you mention contradiction to a Ricardian, the
Ricardian just brushes it off as if it’s unimportant, when in fact it’s
absolutely foundational for how we should understand how capital works.
*Neoliberalism vs monopoly *
/We had Francis Fukuyama on the show, I think sometime last year, maybe
around this time last year, and he argued that neoliberalism ended in
2008. I know better than to ask you if neoliberalism is over, but you
are the author of a very influential book, a brief history of
neoliberalism that I know is formative to my education and many of the
people in this audience. I want to ask you instead, how is capitalism
reorganising itself in this era?/
The coercive laws of competition were not working very well in the 1960s
because we had monopolies. And when monopoly power is strong, the course
of laws of competition don’t work so well. And so we had the things like
the three big auto companies and the big steel don’t. So in the 1960s we
had if you like failing competition and the whole project of
neoliberalism was to reanimate competition and to force the coercive
laws of competition to produce the technological changes which get you
into the crisis of value formation.
Now the end result of fierce competition is monopoly and right now
what’s interesting is we’re back into a world of monopoly capital. We’re
not talking about it formally, but that’s in fact what’s happened. I
mean, I mean, look at that organisation that exists amongst the
high-tech companies. Was it five or six companies?
/Magnificent Seven. /
Magnificent Seven. Okay. Well, it used to be, you know, the five big
auto oil companies and so on. But now we’ve got we’re back into monopoly
power and that monopoly capitalism is really strong right now. and has
got to a point of centralising immense powers of capital and of course a
lot of that is also associated with a distribution of income that is
incredibly lopsided.
So that you then get to this crazy kind of stuff with Musk becoming a
trillionaire and all of that going on, and that is a result of an
increasing concentration of monopoly power.
*Automation and crisis*
/A few years ago, I went to the Reagan Presidential Library and there’s
a fantastic exhibition about stagflation. This is something it’s a
portmanteau of stagnant wages and inflation which was supposed to be
impossible in the theoretical model of economy from John Maynard Keynes.
This was the consensus way of organising an advanced political economy
basically up until that point. How should we understand that crisis of
the 1970s that later led to neoliberalism?/
In 1945, there was a new world order developed under US hegemony and the
US was if you like defining the rules of the global game, right? But
each country had its own kind of class struggle and its own class
formation and therefore you had a world which was globalised at one
level but another level was each each country was fighting its own battle.
So that, for example, the rise of the communist parties in Europe, the
rise of Eurocommunism, socialist governments, all of those those kinds
of things, labour-favorable legislation, all of it was there, but at the
same time it was not very dynamic. It was very monopolistic.
And so you would find a left analysis of this in the work of Paul Sweezy
for example on monopoly capital, saying that the impact of this is
stagnation – that since the auto companies are only in competition
between three of them and they did price things – there was very little
incentive to be dynamic.
But then by the 1980s you open the thing up and you get the German auto
companies coming, the Italian or the French, in the end the South
Korean. And so coercive laws of competition are coming in the coercive
laws of competition for very weak in the early ‘70s and so there’s there
you get actually a great deal of stagnation the technological dynamism
is not there there’s not the incentive to it there’s not intensive
competition very much and so it was it’s almost like capitalism in
general went to sleep and forgot to wage class struggle.
And then we get the analysis of this which came in, in the 1970s. And
the attempt to return it so that much more competition between the
labourers so that you go from a thing where people had trade union jobs
to precarious jobs with no time. And we get this notion of precarity
into the labour force coming in.
And of course the core of what the traditional class struggle had been
about which is the auto workers and the steel workers starts to be
diminished. I arrived in Baltimore for example in 1969 and there was a
huge steel works employing 30,000 people at Bethlehem Steel. By the time
you get to the 1980s, they’re producing the same amount of steel, but
they only employed about, you know, 10,000 people. And by the time you
get into sort of 2000 or so, it’s gone in favor of the automobiles
coming in from elsewhere.
So this is why this balance between monopoly and competition is
important and why I think it’s important to start to look very much at
the reassertion of monopoly power and what that’s likely to mean over
the next next few years and how central governments are going to deal
with it, because at the same time what’s going to happen in terms of its
deployment of all forms of technological innovation in the past, have
been used to diminish the power of labour.
So whatever else happens with of artificial intelligence, you’re
absolutely certain to see a further diminution of the power of labour to
the point where labour has become almost inconsequential in the economy
because it’ll be all automated and all done. And we’ll get this K shape
we’re talking about where you know one group in the population is going
upwards in terms of its of its well-being while the rest is really
falling down.
It’s interesting that the Chinese right now are faced with a somewhat
similar and their response to it is to set up an idea that they are
going to develop common prosperity. Common prosperity. //
/Yes. What does that look like?/
It looks like, as Xi Jinping said, ‘we have three mountains to climb.’
We need to get public access to the whole population, which has to have
adequate access to education, to healthcare, and to housing. Now, if a
political party came along and said, “Forget everything else, but we’re
going to solve those three problems,” you would win hands down, right?
But in China there’s an instruction how to do that, is the big thing.
China has got several provinces which are been set up to set up the
common prosperity. And interestingly in one of the provinces is the
place where all the Chinese billionaires live and they’re having a rough
time right now because it’s all their billions are being utilised for
common prosperity. China is really interesting.
*Circulation and consumption*
/I think what’s underneath this analysis of neoliberalism in the last
few years is what were the models we had previously? What can we draw
upon? And I think what we’re living through this, at least not you and I
right now, but in the discourse at large, is whether it is possible to
restore that golden age of liberalism. What were the necessary
preconditions that allowed that to happen? Is it possible to go back to
that if the neoliberal model is failing us now?/
No, I don’t think you can go back to it for very some very simple
reasons. One of the points I’m making in the book is that the increasing
mass of capital is the real problem. I mean the total value of goods and
services in 1950 was on the world is calculated by the World Bank to
have been something like maybe $9 trillion something like that. By the
time you get to just before COVID came along, it was $90 trillion, and
now it’s up to well over a hundred trillion dollars.
And you’ve got to find investment opportunities for this huge amount of
capital. Musk has all of that money. What is he going to do with it? If
you’re going to spend it on something, where’s he going to find where’s
he going to find places to spend it? So there’s a revolution going on,
in terms of how capital is organised where it has to deal with this
increasing scale of what’s about and part of this is also connected very
strongly with the environmental issues because you know it’s one thing
to talk about environmental politics when you’re dealing with $9
trillion in the global economy. There’s quite another when you’re
dealing with $90 trillion and in 20 years you might be talking about
$200 trillion dollars.
Where are you going to get the investment where where’s the investment
opportunities? What you know what’s going to going to happen? So we
can’t restore what it was like back then, because we’re now in a
different scale and therefore the increasing scale at which capital is
working has become significant.
And I think that that scale when you when you look at the volume of
output of goods and services from and you match it with climate change
and greenhouse gas emissions they go together. So, you know, we’re
really screwing the planet, really well, right now, by this scale. And
nobody seems to know exactly what to do about the scale at which a lot
of this is happening.
And I can tell you one of the interesting things about the scale is that
Marx talks about the circulation of capital and says, ‘well you know
there’s a certain amount of production time and circulation time and
then there’s consumption time.’ How long does it take for consumers to
take a commodity and consume it away and come back into the market to
buy more of it? In other words, there should be a short turnover time of
consumption.
When Marx was writing, there was very low turnover time of consumption.
Now, it’s a very short turnover time. And Marx kind of says the optimal
turnover time of consumption for capital is zero. You want a form of
consumption in which it almost instantaneously set up. Where are those
forms of consumption?
Look what the hell’s going on right now with the World Cup. You’re
producing something which is being consumed within 90 minutes. That’s
pretty good. And actually it’s interesting the monetisation of all the
major sports. You know, Guy Debord wrote /The Society of Spectacle/ back
in what 1967. Capital produces spectacle. We live in a Netflix economy,
right?
And the turnover time in tourism is immense. Again, you know, when I was
a kid, the idea you would have, these ocean liners going around sort of
selling cruises for, you know, 10 days. So actually, what one of the
things that’s happened is that we’ve been accelerating the turnover
time, and we have to do that because there’s so much being produced that
we need something which actually is, it gets lost within two days.
So we’ve now got an economy that produces something and of course a lot
of the time it produces it in a situation where it’s going to produce
new things. So a new set of phones has come in. There’s this planned
obsolescence and all kinds of things like that.
So the whole consumer world has been upended by this rapidity of
turnover time and it’s hardly surprisingly we’ve had all of these
conferences about trying to curb the greenhouse gas emissions, but every
time you try to do that, the acceleration of the turnover time takes you
back to where you were before. And hardly surprisingly, the greenhouse
gas emissions have not fallen, you know the graph goes like this, and it
keeps on going like that and every time there’s an attempt to do
something different.
So you want to solve the greenhouse gas problem, you got to solve the
turnover time problem. And you know the monetisation of all the sports
and the big investments that go into sports and so on, and those
turnover times, is very important.
So we live in this different this really different world of consumerism
and one of the things it’s hard to do from a Marxist perspective to talk
about consumerism, because there’s a theory of underconsumption which
all the conventional Marxists hate, and so as soon as you say well
consumer time, is important they kind of say, ‘ah yeah you’re just being
an underconsumptionist.’
So this is at the real heart of the problem, and it’s a very serious
heart of the problem, as to exactly where the demand is going to come
from, with the turnover times which are going to allow this system to
keep on growing, so that it goes from 100 trillion to 200 trillion in
the next century.
*Theories of value *
/Previous to Marx’s Capital, what was the theory of value that we could
find in Smith or Ricardo?/
Well, Smith has two theories of value. The first theory of value is that
value arises out of labour, pure and simple, right? And this this was
quite well accepted to some degree, but it raised a moral problem which
was kind of interesting, that if labour is the source of value, then how
come the labourers get so little of it?
So in the 1830s and 1840s, you get this Ricardian socialism with John
Stuart Mill and all the rest of it, which says, ‘well you know the role
of the state is to redistribute, to deal with that problem: the fact
that the work will be by people who are producing the value who are not
getting any of it.’
The theory of value was a precursor to that: the value of a commodity
depending upon adding up the value of the inputs into the commodity. And
the inputs were of three kinds. There was land and there was labour and
there was capital.
So Adam Smith said the value of the commodity depends upon how much
land, labour and capital is introduced into it. That was later taken up
in the neo-classical world where they said that that way of setting it
up was right, but you needed a better way to think about the marginal
[the next unit of production], so marginal economics was using that kind
of framework.
So, Adam Smith had had both of these, and was a bit short. Ricardo was
more into the labour is the source of all value, and that the value
theory is therefore dependent very much upon productive labour. And he
paid a lot of attention to unproductive labour. So for example, the
gamekeepers who sort of took care of the estates of the nobility, they
were not productive workers. Therefore you had to come up with saying
the value is produced by productive labour, and actually if you look at
it and look at the data and say how many how many people were employed
in Downton Abbey in the 19th century – and it has a lot to do with yes,
a lot of employment was there but it was not productive labour – so that
the question of productive versus unproductive labour became became part
of it.
Interestingly, Marx liked that idea of unproductive labour, because he
said, basically, the only way in which you can match supply and demand
in the market is to have unproductive classes who don’t produce
anything, but which consume and take care of the consumption. And Marx
says a little bit about that and kind of tongue and cheek says imagine
an economy in which that’s the way the world is made. But it was, I can
imagine, that pretty easily right now.
*Marx and Ricardo//*
/What is it precisely that Marx disagrees with in his critiques of Smith
and Ricardo?/
Marx is thinking dialectically. Yeah, I’ve said that word. For instance,
Marx is a process theorist. So if you ask what is capital, for example,
Ricardo will say, ‘well, capital is the amount of money which you need
to produce something: all of the value, of the raw materials which you
need to make something, the value of the labour.’ So that capital is
something that exists within that framework.
Marx says capital is value in motion. If it stops, then the value
disappears. And this is this is why a strike is so important. Because if
a strike goes on, then no value is being produced and eventually the
capitalists will have a crisis on their hands, because no value is being
produced.
So, this this notion of value in motion. And I’ve already mentioned
about the fact that we need to find the effective demand and the
consumption habits which are going to consume all of that stuff that’s
being produced in all of these ways.
I mean, for example, I love this kind of 30 minutes stuff with flash
fashion. I mean fashion in Marxist time. Yeah, the bourgeoisie was
parading on the boulevards of Paris but nobody else was. And then
eventually you get to you know sort of fashions change by the season,
fashions change by the year. Now they change by the hour.
Everything of this sort is speeding up and we have to live in this world
of acceleration because that’s the only way in which you can generate
the demand. So, Marx’s definition, then, is one of value in motion.
That is, is something being done with it, and as it circulates, it can
take on different forms. Here it appears as commodity, here it appears
as money, here it appears as production process, and what we find is the
value goes from the money form to the commodity form to the labour
process to the commodity form and then it’s sold onto a market form. And
then it comes back into the circulatory process.
So Marx is kind of saying it’s a circulatory process, but it’s a
circulatory process that actually has to expand. So therefore, he says
it’s a spiral. So this is what’s important, is that it’s a spiral,
because you need more at the end of the day than was at the beginning.
If you’re going to find a profit, it’s going to be because there’s more
at the end of the day than there was at the beginning.
So the system has to expand. Everybody accepts the fact that capital is
about expansion and it’s about increasing. And that is what the problem
is, and nobody’s going to get rid of that without getting rid of
capitalism.
Which is why the revolutionary theory has to step in and say, ‘well here
is what the alternative would look like, if we abolish the circulation
of capital so that the circulation is stopped.’ And as it’s stopped, so
value disappears because value depends upon keeping in motion, keeping
going.
And you know this business of keeping going is fascinating. And I
arrived in New York about two weeks before September the 11th. And one
of the horrible things about that horrible kind of day was within three
days, the president and Mayor Giuliani both came on the television and
said, “Look, we need to save the economy. You’ve got to get out your
credit cards and start spending.”
And there was suddenly this incredible thing that it the whole all
spending stopped for about three days. The whole of capital was totally
threatened and there Giuliani and Bush coming on the advertising saying,
“Get out your credit cards. You can go to Broadway. They’re discounting
the seats. You can get in to see, you know, this and that and so on.”
And it was a bit astonishing to be in a in a world where everything had
stopped and it had stopped for horrible reasons, but in itself the
stopping was threatening the future of capital accumulation, and
therefore we had to get over it and start consuming again, as fast as we
could, because that’s the way.
You know I often dream and say, ‘suppose we all agreed that for one week
we were not going to use our credit cards.’ What would happen to
consumption? What would happen to the economy? I mean, we have that
power and if you go around and have people like me saying, “Hey, let’s
just not use those credit cards for five days and just see just see what
happens to the economy.”
And you suddenly realise that there’s an immense power in consumerism,
which is latent, and is hard to mobilise, and you wouldn’t get people to
do it. But this is where capital is at, these days. And I will talk
about the acceleration, I will talk about the increasing scale, there
are many things that you can learn from Marx. But one of the things you
cannot learn is what is capital doing in this instant in this day.
What aspects of the capitalist dynamic are threatening our futures and
which aspects are actually possible to cultivate as the roots of an
alternative economic system which will have a different kind of
relationship to environmental degradation, a different relationship to
inequality and the like?
And when I kind of say, you know, one of the things that I think is
interesting is that the one place where there is serious consideration
of those questions is China. And of course, everybody here is kind of
impressed with the idea that China is a mortal enemy of everything. And
the Chinese are not very nice. I can concur with a lot of the criticisms
that might be made of the Chinese. But they are very alert to the
importance of transformation of the economy into something rather
different from what it currently is, with common prosperity being one of
those themes.
Which I think that again, I’d be very happy to have a political party in
this country say, it was about how to forge common prosperity and then
dedicated it to health care, housing and education.
*Neoclassical economics *
/I have I have a few questions about multipolarity and about the Chinese
economy. There’s one fine point that I want to underline. You write
about this in the book, but today we operate under this model of
neoclassical economics and around the 1850s, I believe there’s something
that emerges called marginal utility theory. Why is it that we still
hold on to Marxist theory of value as opposed to marginal utility theory
or neoclassical economics?/
My cynical view of this is that the socialist uptake around that
question – of ‘if the workers produce the value, why don’t they have
more of it?’ – became very strong in the 1840s. And was the chartist
movement and various other things like that which were actually
threatening. And the threat was very real and that at this point an
alternative value theory which did not pose that question, was very much
on the cards.
And if I was kind of very cynical about it, I say somebody somewhere
realised that they had to have an alternative theory of value, and one
which did not pose that question. And so the marginalism – in which the
value is the marginal price of land, the marginal price of labour and
the marginal price of capital – and you put those three marginal prices
together, and you get the money value of the commodity.
And so since labour was far more easily applied, there was much more
free labour around than there was free capital. So you would expect the
marginal return to capital to be much higher because it would be scarce,
compared to the relative scarcities of the three inputs. That became
significant, and the scarcity of capital versus the scarcity of labour
meant that capital would get a higher rate of return than labour.
*Saving capitalism *
/On this topic of higher rates of return so you had mentioned Ricardo
had proposed a model of redistributive socialism. He’s operating off of
this marginal utility theory school, and there’s a number of scholars
now in particular Thomas Piketty whom you write about in the book, he
has a celebrated book called Capital in the 21st Century. He’s a liberal
economist. He’s not a Marxist, but for people who are maybe not familiar
with that text, he’s doing a deep analysis of the concentrations of
wealth. And what he basically uncovers, sifting through troves and
troves of data going back to the Middle Ages, is that there are these
enormous accumulations of essentially dynastic wealth. And that
capitalism, despite how we describe it, does not have this changing in
and out of classes. That basically, where the money was in the Middle
Ages, is more or less where the money is today. So that goes a long way
to describing the financialisation, the financial instruments, the kind
of stagnant growth growth rates in the advanced world. But the proposal
that comes from which is I think most people are on board with analysis,
this analysis, it’s not that contested, is a global wealth tax that
redistributes it. And the argument that you’re making in this book, is
that this kind of re-envisioning of Ricardo’s redistributive socialism,
will be insufficient to solve the crisis today. So perhaps we could
outline what that initial model of redistributive socialism was, of
Ricardo, then make the argument about why this global wealth tax will be
insufficient to solve the crisis of the liberal economy we’re
experiencing now. /
If you put your money to making things, you would probably end up with a
increasing your wealth at the rate of what, let’s say, 1 or 2% per year.
Sure. If you put your money on the stock exchange over the time you get,
you know, 20 or 10 or 15%. So that, therefore, the ultra rich can use
that and put it in the stock exchange, and get seven or 8%. So the rich
get richer and the poor get poorer.
I think there are some other things which I would want to look at. For
instance, if the rate of return on say interest-bearing capital is
higher than the rate of growth, then then the rate of growth can then
actually explode, simply by expanding its hold upon the interest-bearing
capital. In other words, you increase the amount of interest-bearing
capital which means Ponzi financing.
Ponzi financing is a situation where you borrow more to cover the
interest on money you’ve already put in motion. And said the other way
round, when the interest rate is higher, and then what happens is that
you get asset deflation.
And one of the things that I think that is threatening right now is
asset deflation. That is, that when we say what fixes the value of a
house, it has a use value and has an exchange value. And the exchange
values of housing are going up and as the interest rate declines, so
housing becomes more and more of an asset.
Which would you rather hold money or houses? And there have been times
when houses have appreciated at a faster rate and they have been doing
that in the United States and most other advanced capitalist countries
for a long time now.
But then you’re going to get asset deflation. That is deflation of the
housing market. It’s going to get back down to roughly what it takes to
build a house. And then the question is, what kind of house are you
going to build? You going to build an expensive house or are you going
to build a cheap house?
And if it’s a cheap house, then how do you? I mean the cheap housing in
the United States is a trailer. That fixed the basis if you like. So if
everybody started living in trailers and you’ve got asset deflation, so
this is what I would fear for the near future. Asset deflation in the
sense that the stock market will decline, and that might well collapse
the housing market. It may no longer be an asset that you can use as a
collateral for borrowing more money.
So we’ve got many issues these days where, if you like, the current
economy is on a very tenuous basis. But behind it also lies the
increasing scale, because you know there was a bit of mortgage finance
around in Marx’s time, but very very little. And it was only really one
wealthy aristocrat lending to another wealthy aristocrat.
But now of course you’ve got another situation entirely where I don’t
know what the figure would be, but the total value of mortgages in the
United States is in the order of $14 trillion, something like that.
That’s an enormous pool of assets which have a value of $14 trillion.
Now if that goes down then it’s going to be a very big hit on the
economy. The demand which is associated with that, is going is going to
collapse. One of the things that bothers me or one of the things I was
trying to do in the book, is to say when you start to put this all
together and you get a picture of the totality, and you see all of these
corners where there’s a problem, and then you say, who is addressing
those problems, how are those problems being sorted out, Roosevelt
thought he could deal with it. Keynes thought he could deal with it.
But Keynes had a problem, which was he refused to use read Marx. It was
very funny. He had a co-economist, Joan Robinson, who read Marx and was
very good at it. But he refused because in a sense he was part of the
Bloomsbury circle, and bourgeois to the core, and wouldn’t be caught
dead sort of with a copy of /Kapital /in his hand.
But there are all of these areas of weakness right now, and where Keynes
was significant, but really significant, was in his emphasis upon
expectations, and what is the climate of expectations right now. And
that’s one of the things which, I think, again is an arena of weakness.
But one of the things that it needs to do, is that you can sometimes
solve problems in one corner of the economy by adjustments in another
corner of the economy. And therefore we to do this. However, you need to
have a picture of the economy as a whole, which is one of the things I’m
trying to do in this text, so that you understand how it is that you
might be able to manage a contradiction in such a way that you solve a
contradiction or not solve it – but you manage the contradiction
adequately – in one part of the economy, by not emphasising the
destruction of another part of the economy. In other words, you try to
get the different corners of the economy working together in one global
kind of understanding of how an economy works.
I’m very determined to try to find a Marxian political economy in the
midst of all of this which deals with capital in motion, which deals
with contradictions, which at the same time is trying to find a way in
which to satisfy one’s needs and desires of the mass of the population
to live in a decent house and a decent living environment, and a decent
standard of doing. Which seems to me, to be, if you like, the minimalist
aim to which a socialist economics would seek to address.
*China vs USA//*
/Will China become the world hegemon in the 21st century?/
Interestingly, I think in certain respects it already is, if you measure
the size. I mean the reason why China is so important is because of the
scale. The reason the United States is so important is because of the
scale.
Right now, do you compare the two scales, and you say well, if we use
the market rate of exchange, the scale of China means far less than the
scale of the United States. The United States is still the largest
economy, and the largest economy has been mobilised much more in the way
of hegemonic power.
But the trouble is there’s another way of measuring relations which is
purchasing power parity, PPP, which asks the question, ‘how many goods
and services can you get for a dollar?’ For example, for whatever the
money form is – and I mean purchasing power parity – China has a larger
economy than the United states. So in certain areas it is already
hegemonic.
I’ve mentioned the interesting kind of kind of problem of increasing
accelerating demand to keep up with the increasing supply. One of the
big problems China has, is that they don’t consume enough. They’re not
consumerist enough. So it’s very hard for them to develop an an economy
which is going to be challenging the United States, because it’s not the
same consumer power in China as there is here.
But in certain areas, it’s already the case that electric vehicles and
things like, that the Chinese are well ahead. The story of China is
nearly always one in which at a particular point in time, people start
to say, ‘yes it’s doing very well in this,’ but it cannot overtake
United States.
But it has overtaken the United States, particularly in purchasing power
parity but in many other areas like electronic vehicles and things of
that sort. And every time the United States tries to discipline China,
and tries to actually – it’s crazy knowing how a Chinese that what you
do is, you cut off the supply of certain kinds of chips to China and you
assume that you’re disciplining the Chinese that way. Then the thing the
Chinese do, is they steal some copies of the chips, and they take them
off, and they start to make them in China. So at least you know that
they’re going to do this, and they have done this very successfully and
they can do it.
So is it hegemonic right now? In certain areas. I think in artificial
intelligence, they probably – certainly in terms of certain applications
you would not like, which is that everybody in China is on camera. You
see them in the subway and you know who they are and you can track
immediately where they’re going to, and what they’re doing.
So it’s a society of surveillance and they have utilised it to surveil.
But that, of course, is coming in the United States, as well – in spite
of the protestations to the contrary – but we’re almost certainly to see
that.
But I think one of the things – my personal view and I have no way of
saying it’s right or not – is the Chinese are living on a different time
horizon. They’re concerned with investment in infrastructures, but
they’re unlikely to attack Taiwan, for example. They’re unlikely to
throw any of that up in the air, because they know that the way they’re
going, is where the whole world is going to have to go at some point.
And they’re perfectly happy to think that this may happen in 20 years’
time. So, hegemonic. Yes. Yes, I think they are. I think they think that
way. And I think I think we should be compromising as much as possible
with China, and do some of the things to them that they do to us, in
terms of, for instance, taking innovations and figuring out how to how
to apply them.
*AI versus labour*
/I think that I’m going to try and roll a few questions together here,
but superpower competition, multiparity, conflict over chips and rare
earth minerals. there’s an enormous I think we should just call it, an
arms race for AI. Because the potential of this technology is
catastrophic if your competitor or opponent has it, and you don’t have
access to it. However, there’s all of these knock-on effects with
developing that technology, which maybe gives you the lead in superpower
competition because you have a military advantage over your opponent.
However, it’s going to wreak destruction on your economy at home. and
one of the things that you talk about in the book, maybe we can dig a
little bit further into the theory of value that underpins this. How is
it that if all value originates with productive labour that a fully
automated firm which employ which employs little or no labour can still
command a profit?/
Yeah, this is this is actually the familiar question that comes with
Volume One, Chapter One of /Kapital, /is well, ‘what happens if there’s
no labour employed’?
The answer is that, of course, the profit is different from value. And
capitalists will organise themselves – even without labour – to get the
average rate of profit. They’re not bound by having to employ labour.
And so Marx talks about, in the third chapter, and there I talk about,
the way in which there’s an equalisation of the rate of profit because
the rate of profit depends upon capital intensity.
That if you have a lot of capital-intensive machinery, for example, and
then you’re still spending a certain amount of capital and you expect to
get the average rate of profit on it, even though you’re not producing
any value, so there’s a redistribution of value that goes on in terms of
competition between individual firms. And each one of them should get
the same rate of profit, no matter what their capital intensity. Which
means in fact there’s a redistribution of value from labour-intensive
activities to capital-intensive activities.
Which means that if you wanted to think about this in terms of
imperialism, it would mean that the market – through the equalisation of
the rate of profit – would redistribute the value produced from
labour-intensive areas, which was what was going on with China
particularly in the early years, with the vast amount of labour employed.
And all the value of that was being actually taken away, through the
equalisation of the rate of profit and ending up in the United States.
So, so there is a redistribution going on which was very important in
Marx’s analysis, which is something which has to do not with the
equalisation of the rate of exploitation of labour power, but
equalisation of the rate of profit.
And capital works on profit not on the rate of exploitation of labour
power. The theory works on the rate of exploitation of labour power, and
that’s where you get the contradiction that in fact, you could end up
with an economy that employed no labour whatsoever but you could go into
the market and demand the average rate of profit. And you would get it,
because that’s the way capital is organised.
/David Harvey, thank you so much./
***
https://newrepublic.com/article/211329/david-harvey-masterclass-marx
David Harvey’s Masterclass in Marx
/The Story of Capital/ connects the world of the academy and the
world of the street protest.
For over a half century, David Harvey has been a central figure in
Marxist debates around the future of capitalism. He is not a firebrand
with a septum piercing, nor is he a holdover European radical in the
mold of the political parties Podemos//or La France Insoumise,for whom
the spirit of 1968 never died. Rather, Harvey is an academic geographer
who has been reading Karl Marx’s 1,200-page tome /Capital /(/Das
Kapital/) with his students since the early 1970s, first at Johns
Hopkins and then the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. For decades, this
close reading was an exercise in scholarly perseverance for those
striving to get a grip on the fine details of left political economy.
But during the 2007–2008 economic crisis, that all changed: Harvey went
from a noted academic to something akin to a Marxist prophet.
As the world watched the global economy melt down—through hubris and a
startling erosion of the New Deal–era regulations that tamed capitalism
after the Great Depression—many millennial-age Americans were drawn to
Harvey’s lectures on YouTube, including an animated video
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0>, viewed millions of times,
that explains the breakdown of the subprime housing market. After years
of challenging students to read Marx and to value strenuous engagement
with primary texts, Harvey became an unlikely icon for activists,
protesters, and, eventually, the Occupy movement
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-eww849ChA>in the United States and
Europe. Crucially, he showed how housing became a new asset traded on
Wall Street—first, through bundled mortgages and, after 2008, via the
buying frenzy of firms like Blackstone that purchased distressed homes
to become one of America’s biggest landlords in just 10 years. Most
importantly, Harvey encouraged younger people not just to flirt with
Marxism but to read the man himself.
Now, at 90 years old, he has written a book on Marx’s magnum opus for
the generations who came after the New Left rupture of 1968. /The Story
of Capital <https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9781836742111>/connects two
worlds: the world of the ivory tower and the world of the street
protest. It also connects two eras of left-wing thinking, making links
between Harvey’s own generation, who rejected dogmatically Soviet
Marxism (the New Left), and the later generations of younger
anti-capitalists who are often more attracted to decolonization,
feminism, or critical race studies. The first bridge helps connect
academics, who struggle over the meaning of labor theory of value (the
idea that profits are made possible by workers’ sweat but not given to
them), and activists who know they dislike capitalism but are fuzzy on
the details. The second contribution lets in new thinking on society
that Marx failed to consider carefully, or that developed after Volume 3
of /Capital/ came out (in 1894, after his death): most importantly, the
unpaid work women did to reproduce society as well as the role of race,
colonization, and slavery in early capitalist economies.
Tracing technological innovation and the quickening pace of financial
markets,/The Story of Capital/ elegantly shows the need for Marx in the
twenty-first century, as artificial intelligence portends mass
unemployment and as global markets stray from real assets toward
“fictitious capital,” such as holdings of meme stocks and
cryptocurrencies. Harvey, channeling Marx, shows how financiers in 2026
are completely unable and unwilling to stave off future crises, and
gestures toward what can be done.
/The Story of Capital/ begins with Marx’s labor theory of value and his
own witnessing of workers’ immiseration in the slums of Manchester,
before moving on to urbanization, social reproduction, and
environmentalism. The book is densely written, and is sure to please
some of the more ardent academic Marxists who want to know why a falling
rate of profit remains true in an era of super computers and automated
factories. It also appeals to those fighting capitalism at the level of
popular protest, by keeping in focus Marx’s emphasis on workers. What
does increased productivity matter to the reserve army of labor facing
declining wages or mass unemployment if the shipping containers leaving
the port of Shanghai can be loaded with almost no humans involved? A
theory of capitalism that can focus on the de-skilling and then
replacement of human workers is much more illuminating than a
celebratory account of humming assembly lines and worker-robots. As
Harvey shows, Marx was banished from classrooms and forgotten by
activists right when he was needed the most: the Reagan to Clinton
years, when jobs were devalued and outsourced through the North American
Free Trade Agreement while benefits were clawed back from those in poverty.
A theory of capitalism that can focus on the de-skilling and replacement
of human workers is much more illuminating than a celebratory account of
humming assembly lines.
This is not to say that Marx thought that industrialization,
mechanization, or globalization were bad things. He was no Luddite. His
concern was the disconnect between profits and human need: Much like
today’s industrial regions, the slums of nineteenth-century Manchester
that Marx observed were filled with workers who were exhausted,
unhealthy, and miserable while the factory owners dined on beef
bourguignon and claret in their mansions. The factories these days just
happen to be in Shenzhen or Dhaka, not the other side of town. Unlike
the British machine wreckers of a generation before, Marx saw no way to
stuff the technological genie back into the bottle. New tools must be
utilized for the greatest good: Instead of getting rid of the factories,
the public should take ownership of them.
Marx has always been chastised for his predictive gambits. He had a
teleological view of history: Capitalism was exploitative and awful but
also a necessary step—both organizationally and technologically—for
people to come together and build socialism on the carcass of the former
order. Part of his reasoning was historical: Capitalism was not an end
state but a phase. The exploitation of workers under capitalism would
become unbearable and lead to communism, he summarized. Annoyingly, for
his followers, Russia established the first Communist government out of
a feudalist agricultural society rather than the wage labor and
factories of Germany or the U.K.
This complicates Marx’s vision. Yet faulty sequencing does not mean he
was necessarily wrong. In this century and the last, Marx’s critics have
painted him as a Eurocentric philosopher, who believed every nation
would have to go through industrialization and capitalism as European
countries had, in order to get to revolution and eventual communism. As
Harvey observes, capitalism may have started in Europe, and that perhaps
makes it a “Eurocentric” idea, but now it is practiced nearly everywhere
in the world.
Harvey also uses /Capital/ to think about social movements that arose
after Marx’s death. Drawing on feminist scholars such as Tithi
Bhattacharya and Melinda Cooper, Harvey shows how /Capital /inspired
aspects of feminism—particularly feminist critiques of the regulation of
the household, in which the nuclear family unit is designed to be as
amenable to capitalist value creation as possible. In the midcentury,
this meant women carrying almost all of the unpaid care work in a
family, from cleaning to childrearing, while men devoted themselves to
paid employment. The profit motive was also at work in the
transformation of the family during neoliberal capitalism, when many
more women began to take paid jobs and care work increasingly became
monetized. Starting in the 1980s, the workforce changed in gender
composition, particularly the rising service sector, but this actually
boosted profits for large companies in comparison to the free labor of
the midcentury unpaid housewife. While Marx could not have predicted a
neoliberal order that both embraced and simultaneously attempted to
suffocate 1970s feminism, he did show its power to eschew values of any
kind as long as the bottom line was intact.
Another great asset of engaging with Marx, through Harvey’s guided tour,
is that it allows us to think outside of the value-neutral rational
choice theory of economics of our own times, which imagines people as
big fleshy calculators assessing cost-benefit maximization in every
instance, as if people act in their own self-interest and those actions
somehow even out to form a balanced and just universe. Rather,
capitalism has a constant problem of overusing resources. As Harvey puts
it: “Individual capitalists operating in their own self-interest and
seeking to maximize their profit undermine the sustainability of capital
accumulation in general through their suboptimal but economically
rational decision-making.” That is to say that one person’s great good
luck of making a windfall from cutting down an Indonesian teak forest is
most likely detrimental to quite a few other people, not to mention
plants and animals. Harvey continues by observing:
The effect is to create an investment commons which maximizes
individual returns while socializing and minimizing risks. But, as
2007-8 showed, the piling up of investments in high-risk housing
finance eventually results in crises as the number of defaults and
evictions skyrockets.
When the promise of risk mitigation is based on the “natural order” of
individuals pursuing their unfettered interest and ignoring the
so-called negative externalities, you quickly get a world in which
profits are not shared but risk is collectivized.
By the end of the book, Harvey is keen to show that capitalism does not
lift all boats through its global march to extract profit. Rather,
capitalists accumulate wealth through dispossessing others. Corporations
boost profits by keeping pay for their workers low; meanwhile Americans
manage to live with stagnant pay because they can access
rock-bottom-priced goods produced by workers paid even less overseas.
More disturbingly, he points to forms of profit maximization that Marx
could not have foreseen, such as the contemporary practice of harnessing
crises to promote growth: buying up foreclosed homes, privatizing water
as droughts intensify, or taking extreme risks on dodgy financial
products with the knowledge that if a company goes belly-up, the state
will step in and socialize its losses through emergency lending.
Most of all, Harvey communicates the hopefulness of Marx. He still wants
to spread one of Marx’s most important messages: “Collectively, we can
indeed change this world.”
Like Marx himself, Harvey has always been more of a teacher than a
futurologist. Getting people to engage with ideas and truly do the work
of critical reading is the first transformative step to building
political power and a new society. The process of deep reading and
analysis is a luxury that more people would enjoy under socialism. If
work was less mentally and physically draining, people could develop
themselves more fully than being just a wage laborer or a
petty-bourgeois professional. Indeed, Marx famously promised that in the
post-capitalist world “it is possible for me to do one thing today and
another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear
cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner,” without having to take
on any one thing as an identity or caste-like label.
Harvey’s concrete plans for a world after capitalism are equally
flexible. Instead of insisting on revolution, he flirts with the more
modest alternative of degrowth:
The only possible, if implausible, way to save capital from the
finance capitalists would be the evolution of a systemically
deflationary, low-growth economy in which Keynes’s “euthanasia of
the rentiers” is coupled with Marx’s dream of the “expropriation of
the expropriators” (that is, the billionaire class). Hints of what
such an economy might look like can be found in the deflationary
low-growth history of the Japanese economy after the speculative
crash of 1990.
This idea is anathema to many economists and, in a world of fierce
national competition, slowing down gross national product means that
certain nations lose while others win. Yet it is one of the only
theories of unwinding capitalism that considers the environmental limits
to overconsumption.
Harvey has always eschewed Marx as a political-economic seer, and he
puts forth the view that we should appreciate his prescience, writing
from 175 years ago, rather than his (limited) bad hunches. Most of all,
Harvey communicates the hopefulness of Marx. Refreshingly, despite the
state of the world and of the United States, David Harvey still wants to
spread one of Marx’s most important messages: “Collectively, we can
indeed change this world, even though, as Marx points out, this is never
done under conditions of our own choosing.”
On 2026/06/03 08:45, Patrick Bond wrote:
>
> (Formidable material below.)
>
> David Harvey
> @davidharvey.org
>
> Sad you missed out on Karl Marx's supposed dominance over university
> curricula? It's not too late! I've made 7 free semester-long online
> courses to help you read Marx:
>
> * Reading Marx’s /Capital Volume 1/ with David Harvey (2019 Edition)
> <https://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/#capital-v1-2019>
> * Reading Marx’s /Capital Volume I/ with David Harvey (2007 Edition)
> <https://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/#capital-v1-2007>
> * Reading Marx’s /Capital Volume 2/ with David Harvey (2012)
> <https://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/#capital-v2>
> * Reading Marx’s /Grundrisse/ with David Harvey (2023 Edition)
> <https://davidharvey.org/2022/12/register-for-reading-marxs-grundrisse-with-david-harvey/>
> * Reading Marx’s /Grundrisse/ with David Harvey (2020 Edition)
> <https://davidharvey.org/2020/01/new-online-course-reading-marxs-grundrisse/>
> * Marx, /Capital/, and the Madness of Economic Reason (2016)
> <https://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/#capital-concept>
> * The ABC of Contemporary Capital (2022)
> <https://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/#abc>
>
>
> https://www.instagram.com/p/DYSVRH8j3HA/ Ready to listen? The Story of
> Capital by David Harvey, read by Stewart Crankjust hit the shelves —
> audiobook out now, everywhere! #audiobooks
> <https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/audiobooks/> #rbmedia
> <https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/rbmedia/> #businessaudiobooks
> <https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/businessaudiobooks/>
> #bookstagram <https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/bookstagram/>
> #audiobookstagram
> <https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/audiobookstagram/>
> @revdaveharvey <https://www.instagram.com/revdaveharvey/>
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUgKkU4j_aY
>
> *Is Zohran Mamdani Secretly Following his Ideas?*
>
> *Richard Hames meets David Harvey
> Novara Media *
>
> 10 May 2026
>
> *Richard Hames [RH]: David Harvey is a legendary Marxist geographer.
> Maybe you’ve been one of his millions of students – he’s taught Marx
> for over half a century. He’s the author of ‘The Story of Capital’ as
> well as many other books. Talking from his home town of New York City,
> he told Richard Hames what he’s learned from decades of studying the
> most important radical in history, why contradictions appear
> everywhere in our lives, and what he really thinks of his new mayor. *
>
> David Harvey [DH]: There was once upon a time Hanseatic League, which
> was a league of merchant capitalist cities that that had organized
> themselves together and made something work. And I always thought to
> myself, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a a league of socialist cities?
> And in a funny way, what we’re seeing right now is Trump going after
> these cities. So actually the city is now becoming an instrument of
> repression and a vital place of political mobilization and political
> organizing. Again, one of the things that’s happening with socialists
> becoming mayors of various cities and so on. Is there a way in which
> we can put it together and start to actually define an alternative to
> a capitalist city by actually saying, look we can work at these
> different scales and contest at these different scales? And think
> through the way to create a socialist city?
>
> *RH: I first learned about Karl Marx as a teenager from my dad which
> means that I’ve been thinking about the guy for about 15 years. That’s
> enough time sure to cobble together a rudimentary understanding of
> some basics. Even if like me you’ve been foolishly doing other things
> most that time. My guest this week has not just been reading but
> teaching Marx for half a century. He is steeped in it. You maybe have
> been one of his millions of students. I’m talking of course about
> David Harvey. And in that half century, he’s not only been teaching
> Marx and making diagrams to explain Marxist theory, something very
> close to my heart, but has also been pushing the frontiers of Marxism
> itself to expand into questions of space and cities and how those
> impact the development of capitalism. Socialist cities, you might have
> noticed, are having a bit of a moment right now, what with Zohran
> Mamdani having been elected as the mayor of New York. And so I wanted
> to sit down with David Harvey and find out what he makes of the new
> leader of this city he calls home and whether in his 50 years of
> teaching about Marx and capitalism, hadn’t he suspected that
> capitalism might be over by now? David Harvey, welcome to do your own
> research. I want to begin with the question of this new book, right?
> The new book is called /The Story of Capital /and at the very
> beginning you say that what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to
> be mapping capitalism’s domain. That’s something that we’re trying to
> do here as well. There’s a a proliferating almost sprawling collection
> of things that we’re trying to stick together and understand together.
> How does one do that? What is the what is the first step in that
> process of understanding the vast global system of capitalism and how
> have you approached that question through many many many books before
> but also crucially through this new book now. *
>
> DH: Well, I think the art to that is you approach it by getting a very
> good idea of what the concept of capital is and how capital gets used
> and how the system that grows up which we call capitalism - which by
> the way is a term that Marx as far as I can tell never used right, he
> always used the word capitalist mode of production - and so what I set
> out to do was to try to give a picture of capital’s mode of production
> because that’s the engine if you like which drives everything.
>
> There’s lots of other things going on but you can’t get very far
> understanding capital without understanding its mode of production.
> And so the aim was to give a picture if you like of the mode of
> production of capital.
>
> RH: And we have on screen people now can see the diagram that opens
> the book, in a new reproduction. This is an immense construction
> right, this is the attempt to produce a view of that totality. And
> we’ll come back to this diagram later and ask questions about it. But
> how did this how did this diagram develop over the course of your
> life? Right. This is a this is an ongoing project that has had many
> iterations. What is what is new? What is what is different about this
> one?
>
> DH: Well, I had been teaching capital since 1970 and I some years I
> was teaching it three times a year and I was needing some a picture if
> you like that people could relate to and so understand where they were
> in the whole process of circulation of capital. So it looks very
> complicated, but in fact it’s fairly simple that capital - the mode of
> production - you can start anywhere but the easiest place to start is
> somebody holding money.
>
> And so capital first appears in money form and then the capitalist
> takes that money form and goes and buys commodities and there are two
> kinds of commodities. There are means of production and labor power.
> And it then the capitalist then puts those two things together and
> makes a fresh commodity which is then taken out into the market and
> sold in the market for the initial value, plus an augmentation through
> profit and then it recycles again. In other words, there’s a cyclical
> process and it keeps on going. and capital takes many forms. At one
> point it appears as commodities, at another point it appears as money.
> Another it appears as a labor process.
>
> So it has - Marx’s term is - totality. You look at the totality and
> you see these different moments within the totality and then he
> defines capital as value in motion. So what Marx is doing, is trying
> to set up a theory of value in motion which is going to talk about all
> these elements and say we can understand capital by seeing the way
> these the way the circulation process operates.
>
> *RH: And that’s obviously in some ways quite methologically particular
> to Marx although the way in which you described it there could well be
> the ways in which say a systems theorist or a complex economics
> framework approaches the question. But there is something that is
> different about Marx’s method which is that it’s a method of
> proceeding through contradiction and dialectical thought. Like how do
> you get that into a diagram? Like how do you take the question of the
> dialectic and question of contradiction and tension and turn it into
> this? Because from looking at this at a first glance, you’d think well
> this is all functioning quite smoothly. It almost looks like a
> computer chip diagram. And in the computer chip there are different
> parts, but they all work in concert together. How do you represent the
> crisis tendency within capitalism in this form? *
>
> DH: Well, the reason why Marx is so special is that his definition of
> capital is value in motion. It’s a process. It’s not a thing. Whereas
> in bourgeois economics, capital is an asset which is utilized. So it’s
> a thing.
>
> So in a sense, it’s a mechanical model that the bourgeoisie works with
> whereas Marx is working with an organic model in which the most
> important thing is the process. And I always ask students this. I
> said, “No, do you live your life as a process or as a thing?” and of
> course, then people say, “Oh, well, I guess I live it as a process.”
> And the process side is very different from the thing things side.
>
> So, yes, you could take these categories and say, “Oh, we’re going to
> convert them and look at them as things.” But the point about this
> diagram is that at no point does capital remain stationary. It’s
> constantly in motion and it is moving through these different forms.
> So at one point it’s appearing as money form, another point as
> commodity, another is being taken into market and sold.
>
> So Marx’s definition is radically different from bourgeois economics
> in general and it is that difference which I think starts to make
> sense to people because when you ask them do you live your life as a
> thing, or you are treated as a thing by the state, but you live your
> life as a process, and therefore we should concentrate on the process
> side of things rather than on the thing side of things.
>
> *RH: And then the moments where Marx talks about being dotlike
> punctuality, right? Like a moment of being reduced to this increment
> or this unit of something rather than having that full human
> processual life. And I guess that’s not the core perhaps of the
> critique, but it’s but it’s a moment of the critique in the way in
> which capitalism subjects labor. So they feel like a dot or you feel
> like you are this this simple moment in and not a thing in process.*
>
> Yes. When you go to register in social security or something like that
> you are really put in the position of being a dotlike thing making
> claims of certain kinds whereas Marx is saying we have to look at the
> process whereby the value that you create and the value you use in
> your life is perpetually in motion. So, so he his definition of
> capital is value in motion and it’s the motion part which is
> absolutely critical and you don’t get that in bourgeois economics.
>
> Economics engages in something which we call comparative statics. That
> is you can take a picture as it were of what’s going on in the economy
> in 1945 and then you take one in 1950 and you then look at the
> relationship between the two. So it’s comparative statics and you have
> no idea exactly the process which takes you from 1945 to 1950 to 1990
> and so on.
>
> *RH: I think you’re absolutely right to characterize broader economics
> of some schools in that way but there are new ways of thinking about
> the economy, right, for example the Santa Fe Institute has done a lot
> of work in attempting to produce complexity economics and which they
> would argue has the same emergent contradiction self-destructive
> properties that appear in Marxist framework as well. Right? It’s not
> it’s not this question of time, right? This question of process isn’t
> entirely unique to Marx. So maybe you think it is. I mean, is there
> anything we can learn from that particular school of bourgeois
> economics that takes complexity and time and transformation and change
> and destruction and contradiction seriously? Or do you think if it did
> take that seriously it would simply become Marxism?*
>
> DH: No, I think if there are certain times when the economy is working
> well and everything seems fine then the two systems look as if they
> are compatible with each other. but then you have a crisis of some
> kind and typically as Marx says when there’s a crisis the economists
> typically argue that there could not be a crisis if only the economy
> performed according to their text books.
>
> So we then asked the question, I mentioned this circular process
> continuous and one of the things we can we say about it is that it has
> to produce a surplus and that therefore the thing is driven by profit
> and if it’s driven by profit it is therefore expanding. It is
> therefore an expansionary system. and it is that expansion which we
> see around us.
>
> For example, the total capitalist economy in say 1950 was equivalent
> to something like 9 trillion dollars. it is now over a hundred
> trillion dollars. So the expansion. And Marx says there’s a difference
> between a cyclical process and a process which is about a spiral. And
> this system is a spiral. It’s going to grow over time. It is evolving.
> It’s perpetually in change. and that again is something which is I
> think very special to Marx.
>
> And the kinds of terms that he relies upon are terms like
> contradiction. For instance, you can read through capitalist economics
> and you don’t find the word contradiction at all. Whereas remarks is a
> profoundly important word and we have to deal with contradictions and
> we have to do what Mao suggested which is we have to start to think
> about what are the primary contradictions within this system which
> leads it not to equilibrium which is what the classical political
> economist did but leads you leads you to disequilibrium and at some
> point or other become becomes an engine for crisis formation.
>
> So those are the sorts of issues that Marx tries to analyze and that’s
> what is going on inside of this diagram. If you imagine a drop of
> capital circulating round and round and round in this system it goes
> on and on and on and it creates a spiral form and there’s a big
> difference between a spiral and a cyclical system. cyclical system is
> like day and night. the spiral is something which is going to grow and
> expand and take new forms and build new insights.
>
> *RH: We we’ll come back to the question of the question of limits,
> right? Which is perhaps your most famous book, /The Limits to Capital,
> /right? the question of whether or not there are limits or there
> simply ongoing endless process of further capital accumulation and so
> on. I want to get to one of those very contemporary instantiations
> over here. I mean, you are the world’s most famous Marxist geographer,
> but you are also a New Yorker. I’m assuming you voted for Zohran
> Mamdani. I don’t know, maybe that’s a personal question that people
> can’t people can’t ask. Tell us about Zoran as a figure because your
> the other aspect of your work I haven’t quite touched on yet is this
> question of the right to the city. You have a clear and very famous
> article called ‘The right to the city as a frontier of struggle,’
> right at the point of where people lots of people increasingly many
> people perhaps even the global majority now live their lives which is
> in and through cities. Can you just explain to us what is the project
> of the right to the city? And do you think that Zohran Mamdani
> furthers that project? How do you see him relating to that project or
> is this a separate secondary thing that to that much broader political
> goal?*
>
> DH: Well, I don’t know if he’s read my stuff and can relate to it. You
> have to ask him about that. for me I think the interesting thing is to
> say well what point in the circulation of capital is he really
> concentrating on and of course all all of this thing about affordability.
>
> But when you look at affordability and you look at the circulation of
> labor capacity you find that that that is a consumption problem. And
> actually the socialist perspective that he’s bringing to the
> administration in the city is very much about the city as a
> consumption object and improving the consumption capacities and all
> all the rest of it. It’s a a consumerist socialism.
>
> He doesn’t go on about the working class in the way that traditional
> Marxists did. And I’m not saying he should. In fact, I think this this
> concentration on affordability is a very interesting initiative on his
> part.
>
> In other words, I learn from him rather than him learning from me when
> it when it comes to positioning this thing. But if you look at
> something like what’s going on in housing markets, you see that
> actually more and more people are being shunted out of the capacity to
> have a decent life and a decent living environment and a decent house
> and therefore something about the consumer side of life is has become
> critical and many people are relating to it and so to the degree that
> it has a popular resonance.
>
> But it is a very specific approach to how to understand the
> circulation of labor capacity and what part of that circulation is the
> part that he is mainly concentrating on and I think it’s the it is the
> point of consumption which I think is underestimated in a lot of
> Marxist literature.
>
> In fact, I was thinking of writing something on this just to make sure
> that people got the point that we have a theory in Marx which very
> much concentrates on the labor process and is very much about
> production and so on. Whereas the consumerist side is left to some in
> traditional Marxist literature it was often leave left to one side
> entirely. has never been left to one side in my own work. I’ve always
> wanted the consumer part to be significant and that and the right to
> the city is the right to have a living environment which is adequate
> and which is satisfying and which can be sustainable in the long term.
>
> *RH: I think you’d be surprised at how much he’s read. I imagine that
> he’s probably read your work at some point. So, I think it goes two
> ways. I imagine I’ve have no insider information on this question. Do
> not do not quote me, but like I think I think that you you’d be
> surprised at how much he’s probably read maybe. You talked about this
> these different moments, right? So, you have the the moment of
> production, the moment of consumption for the worker, right? We’re
> thinking about a single individual worker. And I want to think about
> that question of totality that you brought in earlier with Marx. How
> does that make us think differently about strategy? Because in some
> ways we are trying to stitch together the demands that the worker
> makes at the moment of production, the demands that the worker or the
> consumer of housing, right, which is more than workers, but the
> proletariat more broadly. the moment of the labor market as well which
> has its own individual internal tensions. Does a successful socialist
> strategy rely on always keeping in mind that totality or perhaps given
> the success of Zohran Mamdani so far, do you think there are times in
> which you can push on just one or just say this consumerist socialism
> as you called it and then get very long way or do you need to keep in
> mind that totality and if so how?*
>
> DH: Well, I think you always for me, I always try to keep in mind the
> totality and then there are moments in which a certain part of that
> totality becomes the center of contestation and the center of struggle.
>
> Now when I when I set up this circulation of labor capacity, you say
> the laborer actually lives in a world where they take on very
> different roles and depending upon where they where they are the role
> is going to dictate very much how their political consciousness arises.
>
> So if we take it as a given that political consciousness arises out of
> the experience of daily life somehow then you’d ask the question of
> well what does the ordinary person living in a city think about?
>
> Now if we think about them simply as laborers in the labor process we
> get certain ideas about well trade unions we should organize and we
> should try to change the structures of production and so on.
>
> But the capacity to labor depends upon living in a family or
> reproduction unit of some kind. So at that point the laborer is
> experiencing something very different. They’re they’re at home,
> they’re at rest, they’re playing with the family or whatever. And so
> they have a different consciousness of the world from that moment of
> consumption.
>
> And the same thing is applied very much in terms of money that when
> the when the laborer gets their wage, they have money power and they
> can use money power as money and do what they like with it. nobody can
> instruct them exactly what to do. and but never nevertheless what the
> bourgeoisi can do is it can raise raise raise it can raise wages and
> increase wages but then win it back by setting up means of extraction
> of the value from what happens in the market.
>
> Now in this instance what we have is a very very interesting thing
> that for example take something like credit card and the extraction of
> value through use of credit cards and we all use credit cards and we
> all are so so our consciousness is very much about well what’s going
> on with the credit card companies? Why are they taking so much money
> from us?
>
> And actually some people can get higher wages and then lose their
> wages because they get caught up in credit card debt. And so there’s
> something going on there in credit card debt that the working people
> experience. But that’s very different from being in the labor process.
>
> And what we’ve got right now is a situation in a city like New York
> where a large number of people are in fact debt bound. And in fact
> this leads them to have a political consciousness and say, “Elizabeth
> Warren, please change those credit card arrangements please.”
>
> Those sorts of things come up and then you say well part of the
> socialist agenda would be to deal with credit card because the credit
> card is become crucial to working-class consumption habits and at the
> same time credit card is a way of extracting value from working people
> but not from the labor process but from the fact that they have to use
> credit cards to be able to put food on the table on Thursday before
> they get paid on Friday.
>
> This is the thing where the understanding of the labor process and the
> circulation process of this kind helps I think understand how
> political consciousness arises because you may see people saying well
> I’m not very happy in my labor process but on the other hand it’ll do
> what really is bothering me is housing prices because they’re not
> finding a place to live so that you move to a different part of the
> circulatory process and that becomes the issue and what M Downey has
> down as isolated a set of issues which are crucial to daily life and
> don’t actually affect the labor process too much.
>
> But it’s interesting one of the first things he faced when he came
> into power was a strike by nurses. So suddenly the labor process side
> of things and now what is he going to say about a labor process side
> of things and how is he going to handle that?
>
> He’s mainly concerned, of course, with affordability, but this is not
> affordability. This addresses affordability by raising wages. And I
> think that one of the things that I point out in the book and I’m very
> strong about is that wage repression has been one of the key features
> of the capital’s economy over the last 30 or 40 years and it continues
> to be a very serious issue and that therefore addressing wage
> repression is to me terribly important.
>
> But I’m not going to say to hey you shouldn’t be talking about housing
> prices, you should be talking about wage repression. But I think that
> somebody who looks at the whole thing would say that wage repression
> is part of the trigger for the problems that exist.
>
> *RH: Well, would you imagine that you are placed in the Mamdani team?
> Doesn’t seem implausible to me. I’m sure you’re very busy otherwise,
> but like imagine that you are you are placed in there. What would you
> have him do? Like what would you what would be the front that you
> would open up? What would be the view that you would give him? What
> would be the insight that you think that you could contribute to that
> campaign to make a New York that considers or a New York
> administration that considers not only this supply side and
> consumption questions, but also the question of the labor process,
> also the question of things beyond affordability? Is there one thing
> that you would have him do?*
>
> DH: Well, I mean he is in a position to mediate, if you like, a labor
> dispute, and I think that he should. That’s one possibility. Now I’m
> not going to sit in the armchair and dictate policies as to what he
> should or should not do. I think I rely very much upon — he’s a very
> creative guy and thinks things through on his own and that’s good —
> but there are many ways in which he can use the mayoralty as a way to
> intervene positively towards in labor disputes, and I’m sure there are
> going to be many such disputes occurring during his mayoralty.
>
> And the other like thing that is that is looming over New York right
> now is, of course, the ICE, right? And the attempt to threaten migrant
> workers or indeed even US citizens who are Hispanic or non-whites,
> right, in some way, or even people who are just opposed to the
> authoritarianism of ICE, that creates this process we have in the
> middle here, which is the competition in segmented labor markets. How
> do what how do we understand from a Marxist perspective what the
> function of ICE is as an organization?
>
> It’s not a good idea to talk about ICE in terms of labor market too
> much. It’s, I mean, they’re turning into the brown shirts of the Trump
> form of fascism, if you like, I can put it that way. One of the things
> we need to do, is to figure out ways to confront the politics that
> have come down to us by Trump and what is going on.
>
> And this is, of course, a global problem because the active rightwing
> is intervening in segmented labor markets in certain kinds of ways.
> It’s using the segmentation, which is anti- ethnic and anti-class.
> It’s using it’s using that as a as a a vehicle to try to control and
> suppress the labor force and its capacity to fight off wage
> repression. So if you look at the the history of wage repression in
> New York City since the crisis of the 1970s, you would you would say
> that this is one of the things that needs to be needs to be addressed.
>
> Mamdani is not in a good position to address that on his own,
> obviously, or take a leadership position, but he I’m sure he’d be very
> sensitive to things like labor troubles and what’s going on with
> Amazon and what’s going on with these other employers that are
> actually fostering wage repression. And but he also has to understand,
> and everybody has to understand, that if you if you fight against wage
> repression and wages rise, if wages rise but the cost of living rises
> even more, then we’re better off. So that that’s why you have to look
> at the totality.
>
> And I’m very nervous about strong movements about raising the minimum
> wage and saying minimum wage should be $20 an hour or something of
> that kind, and you say, but if all of the landlords raise rents by
> that amount, then that that merely keeps you where you are. So this is
> the mode of thinking where you need to have an across the board
> politics which recognizes the importance of segmentation in labor
> markets and how that has worked historically to the detriment of labor
> in general, and how it’s now being mobilized in a very distinctive
> white nationalist right-wing a way.
>
> And again, it has to be fought off at in the labor markets themselves.
> It’s one part of the consciousness of a laborer, is what their
> experience is in the labor market. What’s their experience in the
> carrot crowd company? What’s their experience experience in the
> supermarket? What’s their experience in the living space? All of those
> things are important, it seems to me, in forming the political
> consciousness of the working population.
>
> *RH: The other perhaps big movement that’s come out in the last couple
> of years that’s been very prominent in American discourse, apart from
> obviously Trumpism and the resurgence of the left of the Democrat
> party, is the attempt to move the Democrat party center ground towards
> what is often called abundance. So the figurehead of this is Ezra
> Klein, also from New York. Well, not from New York originally, but a
> famous New York Times journalist. How do we understand what the
> abundance people are trying to do? They call it supply side
> progressivism. The idea is that there’s been this proliferation of
> forms of regulation that have essentially produced too many veto
> points inside the development of cities. A lot of your work concerns
> the development of cities, process of destruction that or creative
> destruction that is necessary to make and remake cities. How should we
> understand the kinds of political economy of someone like Ezra Klein?*
>
> *I think this is a one of those things where my mother had a phrase
> that said basically you can do what you like but everything in
> moderation, and actually it works a bit. And I think that there are
> situations in which the abundance is there, it’s being produced, but
> the problem is that the effective demand has not kept up to be able to
> absorb the abundance.*
>
> DH: I mean I’m theoretically in the book I’m very much talking a lot
> of the time about overaccumulation, about the plethora of capital, and
> that surpluses of capital are terribly important and they it’s very
> hard to get them absorbed. So one of the ways in which — I mean Henry
> Ford was interesting this way when the slump came in 1929 where who
> Ford said, “I’m going to increase the wages of my workers because they
> don’t have enough money to buy my cars and until I get that situation
> I’m going to be in difficult times.”
>
> So there is a there is a moment there where the super abundance can be
> traveled into something which is which is positive from the standpoint
> of the standard of living of labor. The trouble is that a lot of the
> surpluses of capital get do not get channeled in that way. They get
> channeled in different ways.
>
> Leaving aside the absorption of large amass of it by the billionaire
> class, you have a lot of surplus which is being absorbed in things
> which are to me rather rather secondary. For example it’s interesting
> over the last 30 or 40 years all the major sports have been
> capitalized. So, they’re big capital now. Soccer. And they’re huge,
> and how much do you pay a star? They’re getting millions and millions
> of dollars, and what’s being fed to the population is a spectacle.
>
> And the famous line about spectacles, is extortion. So, so this
> spectacle becomes, we’re in a Netflix economy and we’re in a spectacle
> economy, and huge amounts of money are going into it. How much is
> spent by the National Football League? How much is spent by the soccer
> teams?
>
> It’s so you can say, there is an excess and there is always an excess
> there, and one of the things that capital does is to try to make sure
> that the excess is consumed in a way which is not going to actually
> improve the conditions of life and living of the working people.
>
> And so for example the state will build a new soccer stadium or a new
> NFL stadium. Look at how many stadiums have been built, and is this
> the a way in which we want abundance to be organized? And my answer to
> that is no.
>
> We don’t want that. We want the abundance and the overaccumulation to
> be channelled into something which is actually going to improve the
> daily life of the citizens in the street, in education, healthcare and
> the like rather than in entertainment. And you say, if you look at the
> economics of a Taylor Swift event then the surplus is there.
>
> So I think the clients are right to concentrate on the on the surplus,
> and but to talk about ways of how the surplus can be utilized to
> improve the conditions of life of the mass of the population, and in
> that sense progressive liberalism can actually match with social
> democratic socialism so that there can be some an alliance of forces
> around those questions.
>
> But be careful because the fact that there’s a surplus and the fact
> that the surplus is being put into building - a new baseball stadium -
> is not a good idea. The surplus is going to be used to build clinics
> in rural areas and things like that. Then you can say, well no, this
> is a positive use of it.
>
> *RH: I guess they would say that their main focus is on things like
> highspeed speed rail, on energy infrastructure, particularly green
> energy infrastructure, and on housing, which all seem like they
> probably neatly dovetail with this. I guess a different critique here
> is that doing this inside the broadly neoliberal economic structure
> simply ends up benefiting the construction companies, they’re able to
> at scale drive down wages, command better prices on the market, and
> therefore construct lots of either quite low quality or very expensive
> housing. But there is a a way in which these things match onto the
> left or do you do you not see that?*
>
> DH: Yes. No, I think there I worked in housing and things like that
> when I was in Baltimore a lot, and there are situations where you can
> manage to make life better for 5% of the population and then people
> would say that’s trivial, and I would answer well if you can make it
> better for 5% of the population you should do it because 5% can become
> 7% could become 8%.
>
> So the progressive movement, if you want to call it that, which is not
> explicitly socialist. And I think the tradition of Marxist thinking is
> always to be concentrating on the labor process rather than on living
> conditions in the city. And my own work has been very much as about
> urbanization and what goes on in urban life, and I consider that a
> fundamental part of what class struggle is about.
>
> So for me when Mamdani takes on housing in the way he’s doing, I
> applaud that. I think that’s it’s a consumerist issue and we need to
> take care of it, but to take care of it in a way which is beneficial
> to the mass of the population.
>
> *RH: For instance, take housing. There’s a lot of housing being built
> around, but nearly all of it is upper middle class and condos for the
> ultra rich and so on. And right now even Trump has got the idea that
> he ought to curb billionaires going in and buying up housing and
> turning it into rent stuff, which I found — I mean I so the I think
> the precise proposal is that asset owners shouldn’t be able to or
> corporations more generally even shouldn’t be able to buy single use
> houses with family in. Is that surprising to you? Because that was
> surprising to me.*
>
> DH: Well, it was surprising to me and I thought to myself, my god, I
> think that’s a good idea. I mean, the precise line that he used was
> something like a house people live in houses, not corporations.
>
> Which I think literally might be a Xi Jinping quote. Like a house is
> for living in not for speculating.
>
> *RH: I think that is the quote. There is this — I mean this is — are
> we seeing a American populism that relies on the basic ideas of a
> Chinese capitalism socialism hybrid object? Like, are we seeing — I
> think it’s really interesting that when Xi Jinping started to talk
> about common prosperity spheres and that and said there are three
> mountains to climb. One is the mountain of available housing, the
> other is the health care, and the third is education. And I thought to
> myself, if we had a political party in this country that said we are
> solely going to be concerned with those three items and we’re going to
> sort them out so that they actually are organized to benefit the mass
> of the population, I mean, that would be a hell of a thing, right? I
> mean, I mean, not that I mean, maybe I don’t know. I’m reserving
> judgment on the on the question of the Chinese Communist Party.*
>
> DH: Well he’ll [Trump’ll] pervert it. I’m not sure he’s going to be
> serious about it. But the thing the thing is there are things like
> that. I mean, are putting a barrier between billionaire speculation in
> housing markets because they actually benefit from increasing housing
> prices. And so they have no incentive to try to bring the housing
> prices down.
>
> *RH: So this is what I wanted to get to. I wanted to get to this this
> sense that inside the abundance movement there is this contradiction,
> right, between people who wish to expand the housing stock because
> they think that would be good for everyone even if it’s relatively low
> quality, even if it’s or even if it’s luxury housing, right? Both of
> these would be opposite ends of the bad spectrum. And then there’s
> this tension with the house-owning middle class, right? Who actually
> benefit from the scarcity of housing itself. So it’s very difficult to
> locate a constituency of people apart from those who are ideologically
> driven towards this.*
>
> DH: Right. Well, that’s a that’s a typical contradiction, right? Which
> is why you need the concept of contradiction and you can’t do without
> it, right?
>
> *RH: Yes. I mean like I think this this discussion of the competition
> with China as well among American progressives is going to become
> increasingly interesting over the next few years. Are is America
> really going to be able to compete with China? Is a is a really
> ongoing question. Maybe I mean that’s a very generally posed question,
> but what are your thoughts on this question of America’s ability to
> compete with China given all its structural problems and given the
> extraordinary growth rates of Chinese capitalism?*
>
> DH: Well I’ve been in China three times and I said I have to say I’m
> incredibly impressed by what they are doing in the way of highspeed
> rail networks and the everything complete building of new cities and
> all the rest of it. So, so I’m very impressed, but I for mainly health
> reasons, I haven’t been able to go there in the last four or five
> years, and it’s so I don’t know quite what to make of all of the things.
>
> The only thing I do know from the little that I have have studied it
> is that you should never count the Chinese out. They are very very
> fast and do things and I mean they built a high speed rail network in
> about 5 10 years. They’re still struggling to find some way to get
> from Los Angeles to San Francisco in this country. So they’re they’re
> they’re really quite quite extraordinary.
>
> *RH: And there is a myth that everything is determined at the center.
> It’s not. It’s a highly decentralized world. The party proposes and
> then the regions and villages and all the rest of it proposes almost
> like a market for governance.*
>
> DH: Yes. And they get a lot of things wrong. And don’t get me we get
> into this thing of oh well they’re they’re they’re super magicians.
> Well, they are pretty good. And I think the United States is actually
> right now, much of the Trump policy is actually weakening the United
> States’s position in relationship to competition with China. There’s
> no question about that.
>
> And I think that look at look at what happened. They tried to — they
> took a company like Huawei and they tried to emasculate it, and now
> it’s turned up as being one of the big companies in artificial
> intelligence that can switch things around quickly. And of course the
> state is enmeshed in all of this.
>
> And so so I’m thinking that over the next few years China is the place
> to watch, and I hope that they don’t get into the whole competition of
> military hardware and all the rest of it, which I find very
> distressing. And I think that that’s a way of dealing with surplus
> capital, as Marx says about about military expenditures. It’s like
> tipping value into the sea, and there’s been a lot of tipping value
> into the sea since 1945.
>
> I mean I made the argument in the book that the two means by which the
> surplus was absorbed after 19 after 1970 or so — the two ways were
> military expenditures and a lavish urbanization that was largely about
> spectacle rather than about making life decent for the mass of the
> population. So this is a this is this is a problem.
>
> *RH: Yes, I have the — it was just off off camera there on the diagram
> — but we have the military-industrial complex circulating around our
> all our thoughts here on this Chinese question. I mean, the there are
> these people who will say, and I think it’s probably almost certainly
> correct, I mean I think you have the statistic in your book which is
> that in the two years between or three years between 2011 and 2013
> China used as much concrete as America did in the 20th century.*
>
> DH: So we do have this enormous problem of both ecological limits and
> quite possibly overaccumulation or over capacity, the vast building of
> cities that which no one lives and so on. Of course, the idea of a
> socialist planning system is that you try not to run into those
> problems, but as capital as China has liberalized, right, it has run
> into exactly the same set of problems that that would have happened in
> America as well.
>
> Although there’s an under supply of housing in America and in certain
> Chinese cities, there’s an under supply of housing in Shanghai and
> Beijing. And it’s most of the excess of housing was in the second and
> third fourth tier cities as I understood it.
>
> And we often say well they built house they built estates where nobody
> was living. Well that was true maybe six or seven years ago, but it
> ain’t true now. So again, you have to be careful what truth you come
> up with because there was a time when it was that was the case. The
> ghost cities were around, but they largely been absorbed as I
> understand it.
>
> *RH: Yes. That’s my understanding as well. I mean I’m bullish on
> China. I think it’s going to be it’s going to be the place to go, the
> place to be. I’m currently trying to learn Chinese. Are you?*
>
> DH: No. But as I was a very close friend of Giovanni Arrighi and
> Giovanni used to say there were two big things that he really
> regretted about his life. One was that he never learned to play the
> piano and the second was that he hadn’t learned Chinese.
>
> RH: I also can’t play the piano very well and I but I would like to be
> able to do that as well. Maybe so karate. I don’t know. I’ve got a
> whole realms of unfulfilled ambitions but hopefully I’ll be fulfilling
> them.
>
> *RH: Let’s talk about Arrighi because you have this this great quote
> which I want to actually get up on the thing. Marx’s open concept of
> totality as an ever-expanding ecosystem invites consideration of
> contingencies, the internal mutations, the innumerable seeds of
> alternative practices. *
>
> DH: So we have this idea of the open totality, the sense that even
> though — and this is what’s very attractive about this diagram, right,
> is that it seems to map out everything. Of course, there are these
> contradictions, but nevertheless, as we’ve already alluded to, there
> are the questions of race in the segmenting labor market that don’t
> necessarily fall into this one diagram. And the project of this show,
> I should say, is trying to expand this diagram endlessly in all
> directions. At some point people can see the whole thing.
>
> What I did in the book was to say look I’m really concentrating on
> capital’s mode of production. And at the same time that mode of
> production exists in a certain context which I call the capitalist
> social formation. And what Marx is mainly concerned with is the mode
> of production not the social formation. But occasionally he runs off
> and talks about the social formation.
>
> I tried to follow that a little bit by saying that when we’re looking
> at labor markets and we’re looking at different labor markets in
> different parts of the world, different segmentations, in some labor
> markets women are not allowed and don’t have access and others they
> do. So the labor markets can vary a great deal. But that is all in the
> social formation and the fact that there’s repression of women and the
> failure to mobilize their labor is a contingent factor in the social
> formation.
>
> So I’m very aware of the fact that what I’m what I’m doing is a
> simplification of what goes on in the labor markets, but I leave it
> open to say, well labor markets can be all can be organized in all
> kinds of different ways. And I did a lot of reading about 19th century
> and the hiring halls in cities like Manchester and so on were were
> terribly important institutions. The same thing applied in Fr France
> and so on.
>
> So I don’t want to get to the thing that it’s all tightly wrapped up
> because it’s not tightly wrapped up. There’s a huge variety of labor
> market situations and even even within a country like the labor market
> in Alabama is, I’m sure, very different from the labor market in
> Connecticut.
>
> Which is also to go back to our earlier discussion about ICE. One of
> the things they’ve been doing, right, is to go to places where there
> are informal day markets for labor. You have a construction project,
> perhaps you hire three people who are migrants to the US and hire them
> for one day and then they have to go back again. And these are the
> places that ICE has been in part targeting, not just the city but the
> peripheral zones where people congregate in order to participate in
> the labor market in these informal ways.
>
> *RH: Let’s talk about Arrighi. You, as you say, great friends with
> Giovanni Arrighi. What did you learn from him? Because when you’re
> thinking about this open totality or think about this totality that
> can always have these new contingent or different parts or goes
> through different phases of capital accumulation, which is part of
> Origi’s main contribution, what did you learn from him as an
> interlocutor and as a friend?*
>
> DH: His deep deep commitment to something called the long duree, and
> that you could look at what’s going on around us now and I would be in
> a seminar and I’d be waxing forth about what’s going on blah blah
> blah, and then Giovanni would intervene and say well now you’ve got to
> look at the long duree and all this thing, and what you see in the
> long duree is that something different is happening than what you’re
> thinking.
>
> So this this was a regular occurrence in the seminar and I felt he was
> he was he was right, but you don’t turn it into a mechanical thing.
> That’s why I think it’s the evolutionary process that he thinks about
> and the absorption of certain aspects of the state, for example, is
> absorbed into capital and the state at certain point becomes capital.
> And that’s always possible, but it’s also possible for it to loosen
> its chains to capital and do something different outside of capital.
>
> So, so his approach to the to the state and so on was always against
> the background of this long duree.
>
> *RH: Did you ever before that — I mean you started, as you said
> earlier, working on teaching Capital in the 1970s. Did you ever
> perhaps before your /Limits to Capital /book, did you ever think okay
> well it probably be over by 2026, capitalism as a as a social whole,
> or did you always have that long centuries long process in mind?*
>
> DH: I think well I was educated, if you can call it that, as a
> historical geographer. And historical geography is to me really very
> interesting because you see these things changing and things get left
> behind. I would be wandering around in rural Suffolk and you find this
> late medieval church which is actually a product of the wool trade
> with Flanders, and you — I always appreciated that side of things.
>
> And I would I would bicycle around the local area and find myself
> suddenly confronting an old barn that came from about 1100. And so
> always I was the historical geographer, it was always there in my
> thinking. And it became very strong, of course, when I took on the
> whole Paris book, which was very much about a historical moment and
> transformations occurring.
>
> But again I was very emphatic about what are the processes at work
> which make the Paris commune of 1871 so different from the revolution
> of 1848. What happened in between and what was the process that that
> changed the world under Louis Bonapart. So I’ve always I’ve always w
> been interested in that, and I and had some good conversations with
> Giovanni because he was talking very much about the Italian city
> states and Amsterdam and so on. So so we were we were very close on
> all of that.
>
> *RH: You’re talking about the period of Haussmann’s reconstruction of
> Paris, right? Do you see similar dynamics? Because so part of your
> reading there, as far as I understand it, is that this is about the
> attempt to absorb the surplus capital right into the physical
> construction of Paris. Is that right?*
>
> DH: Yes. Yes.
>
> *RH: Do you see a similar move — and I was going to make this analogy
> earlier — but do you see when we’re thinking about the abundance
> people a similar demand from them to work out what to do with the
> massive overaccumulation of capital and find profitable enterprises?
> Is that another way in which we can read the political economy of our
> client?*
>
> DH: I think I think so. But I think it’s very important to understand
> where the surpluses are coming from and why they are being produced in
> the way they produced and what what what kinds of surpluses, what
> kinds of mechanisms are being devised to absorb the surpluses.
>
> I mean for example, one of the arguments Marx made and which has
> always stuck with me is that in difficult times the capitalist resorts
> to forms of production which are instantaneous in terms of their
> consumerism. In other words the turnover time of capital is reduced as
> far as you possibly can to something close to zero.
>
> And actually if you look you say well since over the last 40 years the
> monetization of spectacle and the actually selling of experiences
> rather than commodities and the commodification of experience has
> become a very important part of our lives. And so we now live — I came
> to political consciousness in 1950s — and what I look at now is
> Netflix and all these things, and it’s a society spectacle doubled
> down on.
>
> But the thing about spectacle is that it’s all over just just to give
> you an example. I’m fascinated by the economics of cruise liners.
> Okay. I mean, it’s a vast amount of capital gets invested in a cruise
> liner. Three thousand people there in the labor force, three or four
> thousand people are there as joy riders, and it’s all over in a week
> and they can go to the next cruise.
>
> So for instance, it’s so interesting to hear Trump talking about
> bringing work back to the United States. And one of the things that he
> emphasizes all the time, he’s always talking about manufacturing.
> Well, one of the big shifts has been tourism. But what tourism is
> about is the absorption of capital over in a very short period of time
> for for about a week or something like that while somebody goes and
> sits on a beach, something like that. So, so tourism has become huge,
> but Trump doesn’t talk about tourism.
>
> And of course, there’s a big problem now, right? by taking these
> people out of the labor force, the labor force that typically looks
> after tourists when they come to town is being essentially diminished.
> So, we we’re Trump is doing all the wrong things if he really wanted
> to get the economy right again.
>
> But it was interesting and when COVID came tourism stopped, the number
> of air flights sagged. I have a diagram in the book, number of air
> flights, and then after COVID was over the thing shot up again. So we
> now got huge business of — I mean tourism is one of the major forms of
> absorption surplus.
>
> *RH: So, I have a I have a pivot I’d like to make to something else I
> wanted to ask you about. It’s going to be quite contrived, so bear
> with me. We were talking about cruise liners and the economics of
> cruise liners. One of the other things people have been doing with
> cruise liners in the last 10 years is there’s an institute called the
> sea setting institute and they were a libertarian group who were
> trying to break away from national regulation, national law, by going
> out into the open sea where only the law of the sea applies and
> building islands or building structures out in the sea where they
> could circumvent labor laws and so on. And of course it turned out to
> be very difficult to build structures out in the open sea. And so what
> they eventually turned to doing when the cruise liner industry started
> to decline is they built they bought up lots of cruise ships and
> placed them in the open ocean and tried to turn them into functioning
> citystates that would be beyond the rule of any government where they
> could do labor exploitation, where they could do science experiments,
> they could do biotechnology. And I wonder if you have thoughts about
> this more stable version of that which is called Prospera to the same
> set of people who basically found this carve out in Honduras. And this
> is one aspect of what you very famously call the spatial fix or the
> spatial fragmentation of capitalism, right? The move away from
> homogeneous zones of accumulation towards more and more fragmented
> organizations of law regulation so that you can pursue different kinds
> of projects. How should we understand this process of spatial
> fragmentation inside capitalism?*
>
> DH: My introduction to pop music came from listening to those radio
> stations out in the North Sea.
>
> *RH: Right. *
>
> DH: Yes. Radio Caroline and all the rest of it. I would listen to Top
> of the Pops on Sundays through this crackling medium.
>
> No. Look, there are a lot of things like this and there is a way in
> which abundance, if you want to call it that, and people have
> surpluses they can put into all kinds of things. The big issue is to
> what degree can these be mobilizing stations towards the construction
> of an alternative political economy, and I don’t think I see much of
> an answer to that problem in the things they do.
>
> I mean, I like what they’re doing and I think it’s fun and all the
> rest of it, and I and I’m glad somebody’s doing something different,
> but how to turn it into a form of political economy which can actually
> meet people’s needs at the same time as it does not overexploit labor,
> over overexploit nature, overexploit social relations and rest of it.
> I thinkthat’s the problem for me.
>
> *RH: I think that so that that’s very interesting you say that the
> normal I think or the classic read from the left of these is that they
> are essentially modes of capital moving into a new area in order to be
> able to increase the exploitation of labor. Right? So they are this
> fragmentation rather than the anarchist commune, right? Or the commune
> that that tries to get beyond the bounds of capital, but instead to
> become even more deeply exploitive of labor. Maybe we’re thinking
> about different things here. Don’t know.*
>
> DH: Well, I’m sure in certain circumstances that could be the case,
> but again, this comes back to my notion of a social formation. Kinds
> of things can go on there, some of which could actually be mobilized
> in something in a different direction.
>
> I mean there are some explorations of alternative monies and monetary
> forms, local economic trading systems and things of that kind. All of
> which are belied by the whole question of scale, that they work very
> well all the time. You’re working at a small scale. As soon as you get
> to the scale of the current banking system, they have nothing to say.
> I think there’s something very interesting about that as a problem.
>
> We definitely talked about this with Marrick Pollock who is one of the
> theorists we had on last, and he also talked about the same thing that
> you were talking about with the circulation or the need to make more
> to make capital valorize or valorize values more quickly, particularly
> about hedge funds and so on and this question of the scale of capital
> and how it becomes elastic and strange and difficult to get a get a
> handle on.
>
> *RH: I want to come to the question going back to this big diagram
> over here.Getting back to the question over here which is about this
> diagram. You’re of course the world’s most famous educator in the
> Marxist tradition. When you started that project it wasn’t online and
> then it became got put online, I think with the assistance of a
> graduate student. Is that right? You write about this briefly in the
> book. What impact has that had do you think? And as someone who is
> also attempting a much more scattered perhaps educational project of
> their own, what have you learned right about that process of trying to
> understand something in a collective and open forum?*
>
> DH: One of the reasons I with this — we could be a bit of diversion —
> one of the reasons I like working at the metropolitan scale is that
> Lefebvre suggested we should think about the world in three scales.
> One is the scale of the local neighborhood and intimacy and all the
> rest of it. The other is the global scale and then in between is the
> metropolitan scale.
>
> And I like the metropolitan scale because it actually unifies the
> what’s happening at the local scale, very local scale, and what’s
> happening at the global. And in that sense I think that it has much
> more possibility of rooting a path towards an alternative to capital
> accumulation as the dominant mode of production. And therefore for
> that reason I’ve always been working at the metropolitan the
> metropolitan scale.
>
> If you work at the local scale at some point or other people’s going
> to say how do you scale up, and as soon as you start to scale up it
> disappears. But we have to deal with that all of the time at the
> metropolitan scale. So I always found that significant, even when I
> was in my bourgeois phase, if you can call it that, where where I was
> dealing with when I was I was dealing with social social justice and
> social justice and saying talking about how we should discuss that.
>
> And of course you could do that at a global scale, the neighborhood
> scale, or the metropolitan scale, and I preferred always to try to
> work through the social right to the city and all the rest of it at
> the metropolitan scale and then think about ways in which challenges
> could be imagined from the metropolitan scale to a global scale and to
> deeper understanding of the neighborhood scale.
>
> So I’ve always been very very concerned with the scale and of course
> that’s the geographer in me coming out as well because it’s all about
> space and spatiality and the way in which people start to organize
> their politics around places. So place has a very important role
> politically.
>
> And if you can start to organize all of those places and spaces where
> alternatives are actually being sought then you start to have a
> political movement. So I’ve always felt that there was a tendency to
> try to dismiss the metropolitan scale as somehow other not viable. But
> I think that for me anyway the first step towards trying to define an
> alternative to capital and capital’s mode of production would be to
> work at this metropolitan scale so that we can deal with the issues
> that arise about the global and the issues that arise from the
> neighborhood.
>
> So in a sense it’s always been there and again that comes back to my
> historical geography and that why why was it that capital accumulation
> concentrated at a certain scale. And this is where my work with
> Giovanni was very important because the scale of metropolitan scale is
> perfect for understanding things like the Italian city-states.
>
> And you could you could start to see how the actually the rise of
> capital was very much about the organization of this metropolitan
> scale. And I had a fantasy about the rise of capital and the role of
> the urban in the rise of capital which is studied by quite a few people.
>
> And there was once upon a time a Hanseatic League which was a league
> of merchant capitalist cities that had organized themselves together
> and made something work. And I always thought to myself, wouldn’t it
> be nice if we had a league of socialist cities?
>
> And in a funny way, what we’re seeing right now is Trump going after
> these cities. So actually, the city is now becoming an instrument of
> repression and a vital place of political mobilization and political
> organizing.
>
> So it’s interesting you see back in the 1960s the crisis of capitalism
> was an urban crisis and we had the all the urban uprisings in the
> 1960s and connection to civil rights movements and feminism and e
> ecology and all the rest of it.
>
> So the metropolitan scale is for me a very very important anchor for
> the things that I’m doing now. It meant it mean it meant different
> things to me when I was working on that in writing Social Justice in
> the City. Now the metropolitan scale has become something different.
> It’s become in this current struggle going on, and the way in which
> Trump is isolate trying to isolate cities and discipline them, and
> actually the disciplinary apparatus is not there.
>
> So there’s an active fight going on right now at the metropolitan
> scale and that therefore we should think of this not simply as a point
> of resistance to an awful politics but to actually say well actually
> this is this is identifying the right scale for us to actually go in
> the other direction. That is, can we use the metropolitan scale, which
> I hope is again one of the things that’s happening with socialists
> becoming mayors of various cities and so on.
>
> Is there a way in which we can put it together and start to actually
> define an alternative to capital, a capitalist city, by actually
> saying look we can work at this these different scales and contest at
> these different scales and think through the way to create a socialist
> city?
>
> *RH: I think I think you’re absolutely right about that and there was
> a there’s the municipal socialism strand of thinking that became very
> popular actually across the European Union as well. We had a socialist
> mayor of Madrid and so on, and that became quite a prominent network
> in the in the post-crash era of Europe. But it’s interesting we don’t
> think that this is the path towards the alternative, but you do.*
>
> DH: I do and I would like other people to do so because, yes, somebody
> becomes mayor of Madrid, somebody becomes mayor of New York, somebody
> sets up the People’s Republic of Santa Monica or whatever it was. So
> these things are going on all the time, but it’s like they they just
> happen to be there. People do them and it seems it ends there.
>
> Whereas I think that we can actually start to think about the
> organization of life of political and economic and ecological life
> around the metropolitan scale in such a way that we actually deal with
> a lot of the global issues.
>
> For instance, much of the environmental issue now is a global issue.
> And it needs to be addressed. However, and one of the ways to do it is
> to try to address it out of the metropolitan scale and so by paying
> attention to how to scale things up and how to scale things down and
> to actually see that things like the city of London when the GLC
> things like that when they happen, these should be actually not just
> simply things in themselves, but steps towards the actual definition
> and pursuit of the alternative.
>
> *RH: I guess when we’re thinking about this spiral in ever-increasing
> accumulation of capital, it undergoes not only a multiscalar
> transformation, right? So you have transformations at the local level
> and also at the global level simultaneously that relate to each other
> in this feedback loop, I guess you could say, or maybe even in moments
> of dialectical contradiction. But isn’t there a way in which the
> accumulation of capital tends towards a larger larger scale over time?
> That means that only at a certain phase of its development is it
> possible to take the metropolitan scale as the main locus of tension
> or resistance to the accumulation of capital. At the moment, right, it
> seems like the main piece of infrastructure that is being constructed
> in America — and it is a piece of infrastructure — is the development
> of artificial intelligence. And if you had — you can’t really have a
> single cityscale artificial intelligence. I know there are attempts to
> do this. Franchesco Bria, for example, has spoken about this to some
> extent, but I’m not sure it’s entirely possible to have these things
> because they do genuinely rely on internet scale developments. And
> therefore both the development of them and the resistance to them has
> to exist at a at a broader maybe even global scale, certainly a
> national scale, when it comes to this question. And so how do you see
> that process of the spiral obsolescing or do you see the proc that
> spiral obsolescing that particular scale of struggle?*
>
> DH: The answer is I don’t know. I really don’t know quite how the
> artificial intelligence stuff is going to work out. I know
> historically every major innovation has been greeted as the
> possibility of some grand solution and resolution or whatever and it’s
> always ended up being turned into an instrument of repression of the
> mass of the population either in terms of its wage levels or in terms
> of its rights and so on.
>
> So historically I would argue that I mean Marx says it was interesting
> about John Stewart Mill. He was mesmerized by the fact that machinery,
> which should lighten the load of labor, had turned into most vicious
> system to absolutely repress labor and he couldn’t understand why that
> was the case. And Marx’s laughing and he says well of course it did
> that because it was the capitalists who developed that technology and
> you were and it was bound to be used by the capitalists in as a
> vehicle for the creation and absorption and stealing of surplus
> capital from people around the world.
>
> So I’m not I’m not enthusiastic about artificial intelligence. I’m
> sure it’s going to be used by the billionaire class to sustain itself
> and therefore I’m in opposition to it. But I but at the same time it
> is pretty inevitable that this is something that is going to happen.
>
> And actually again one of the things that that’s important in the book
> is that we often attribute technological change to the coercive laws
> of competition between capitalists. But I think the coercive laws of
> competition between nation states is just as important. And in fact,
> right now, the really the what’s going on in artificial intelligence
> is at the state level. It’s the Chinese versus the US, right?
>
> And so it’s not as if I can come in and say, “Oh, just just forget all
> that artificial intelligence.” It’s going to be there and it’s going
> to be utilized as part of the military industrial estab establishment
> and it’s going to have a lot of civilian uses as well, some of which
> are going to be progressive and useful and medicine and so on and some
> of which are going to be highly repressive.
>
> *RH: I wonder if there’s a way of thinking about the that’s that state
> level competition because I have a question about the what might
> happen when the bubble bursts, right? Because it’s very clear that the
> US government and Trump and JD Vance and the people around him who are
> increasingly in dialogue with these AI companies and the AI companies
> who possibly because of the difficulty of getting money on the open
> market because of the unproven as technology as a as a way of
> generating money have needed to turn to the state as am investor of
> last resort. And of course because there is this dimension of
> international competition between the US and China. The US sees this
> as almost existential competition, not dissimilar in its dynamics with
> the Manhattan project, right, where the development the nuclear bomb
> because they see the transformative potential of AI to be so enormous.
> I think if we see the AI bubble or if it is a data bubble, if we see
> the AI bubble being pop in the next year, two years, then we’ll
> probably enter into a situation where the US government feels
> compelled to organize a bailout of those industries because such is
> the existential importance of that industry for the US’s
> self-conception as an international power, right? And you can imagine
> the political struggle that will emerge around this which will be
> which will combine the attempts to destroy the thing that is replacing
> you as a laborer because that’s what it that is what artificial
> intelligence promises to do with the horror and disgust of the
> bailouts that took place in 2008-2009 with the large the previous
> financial crisis where the ruling classes in the bankers and so on are
> bailed out by the state. And so you can it seems like a really toxic
> political cauldron that is being assembled here if indeed this AI
> bubble bursts. Does that strike you as a plausible scenario and how do
> you think the politics of that might play out?*
>
> DH: I don’t I’m not sure how they play out. And as I said in the book,
> so this this this whole thing we’re moving into has all of the Marx of
> a huge Ponzi scheme. And as such we know what happens to Ponzi
> schemes, that somebody at some point or other cries wolf and bang.
>
> How it will — I mean indebtedness right now, and this is again one of
> the things points of the argument I’m trying to make in the book, is
> that indebtedness does didn’t arise by accident. It arose out of the
> fundamental contradictions of capital and therefore it is it is if you
> like a continuation of capital by other means.
>
> And I’m really concerned about what happens when the Ponzi character
> of all of the financing and so on, comes home to roost. And I think
> that at certain point the whole question of what is money?
>
> And it’s interesting. I mean this all of this stuff with cyber
> currencies and huge amounts of money pouring into cyber currencies and
> you go what on earth for how is it how is this going to going to going
> to work out? And I’m as mystified as anybody about exactly what the
> impacts are going to be and what the what the ruling class — which
> itself needs to be redefined I think in terms of the billionaire class
> because it’s essentially a billionaire decision-making structure that
> lies behind much of what state is about — the state in effect now
> belongs to the billionaires.
>
> And when Giovanni says the state is capital then the state is indeed
> acting as capital and as such it’s hard to see how they how they can
> get out of the mess that they’re currently working in. There’s going
> to be almost certainly in my view in the next year or two at least a
> relatively small shakeout. And when I say relatively ,small it’ll
> actually be quite huge, but relative to what would be needed it’s a
> bit like what happened in 2007-08. A lot of stuff was put in but there
> was nowhere near enough to really solve the problem.
>
> And if that is going to be the situation I really don’t know how that
> Ponzi scheme is going and why how it might collapse and what might be
> the consequences of its collapse.
>
> *RH: I should say for people who are watching what’s on the screen
> right now is the is the diagram of all the different deals between the
> different AI companies. So you can see here that OpenAI, who make
> ChatGPT, are invested in CoreWeave or vice versa. And then you can see
> that CoreWeave is invested in Nvidia, which makes chips, and you can
> see that Nvidia is invested in OpenAI and you have this circular
> dealing where the money circulates between them or as often the case
> not even money circulates between promises to buy stock in a certain
> at a certain value or promises to invest or buy certain numbers of
> chips. And then of course these are public companies, lots of them,
> and so the stock price goes up on the announcement of the deal and
> then you can use the money from the announcement of the deal — oh,
> sorry — from the rising stock price to actually pay for the deal that
> you already announced, right? So, it’s there’s a a there’s a strange
> trickery that can be inserted here. Although, I should say for legal
> reasons, I am not alleging that anyone has done anything illegal. So,
> just absolutely clear. I do want to ask my last question. I want to
> ask about the tension here between artificial intelligence and
> capitalism as a whole because there might be something here. Namely,
> that if we take the basic Marxist idea that surplus value derives from
> labor and the capacity of labor to produce something more right at the
> end of the day than was there at the beginning. And we say that lots
> of labor will be replaced by AI but it will not be surplus value
> producing and therefore won’t be able to produce systemically profit.
> Is there a tension between the fraction of capital that is invested in
> AI and the fraction of capital that uses AI who will be if the Marxist
> theory holds accidentally driving down their own profits because they
> will be producing less surplus value if they replace labor with
> machinery?*
>
> DH: I think I think the argument that I’m trying to make goes
> something like labor power is the source of surplus value. Surplus
> value is to some extent like a matter of is how capitalists get
> profits, right? If AI companies sell to other capitalists their AI,
> they’re essentially selling a machinery, right? But a machinery that
> does lots of the productivity of an individual laborer replaces the
> laborer and therefore because that increases the organic composition
> of capital by selling or by replacing workers with machinery
> capitalists are undercutting their own capacity to make a profit.
>
> Yes, there are contradictions all over the place. That’s and what
> which will win out and why is very much on the on the table right now.
> But again, what you’re dealing with is not only a competition between
> capitalists, it’s competition between nation states. And that is
> powered by necessity of technological innovation to provide military
> advantage.
>
> So as I see it the at a certain point the question is going to be
> who’s going to come up with a superior technological mix which is
> going to turn that advantage into a system of domination.
>
> And this is where I mean, what is it that’s driving all of these
> companies, and what is it that’s driving the state, the military
> establishments and so on, to do the kinds of things that they could do
> in Venezuela for example, and then Trump is obviously now believes he
> can do almost anything or his vehicle i.e. the US military can do
> almost anything and that may be wrong. I mean if that whole episode of
> Venezuela had ended up like the one that happened with Iran under the
> Carter administration, we would be in a completely different world.
> This is the beginning of Delta Force, right? the secretive elite squad
> inside the JOC helicopter.
>
> So I think a lot of the monetary stuff at some or other is secondary
> to the military advantage stuff that that’s where I would look and I
> and I think that uh there are other things which are where the
> capitalist class has started to utilize I mean I mentioned
> urbanization and stupid urbanization and projects and so on. So
> there’s plenty of that around.
>
> But what’s so weird is everybody is going around preaching austerity
> at a time of super abundance. And the super abundance could be
> utilized in decent ways to the mass of the population that’s actually
> trying to get by on almost nothing. I mean it is extraordinary when
> you think of it. I mean, here’s the United States with all of its
> wealth and power and all the rest of it, and half of the population is
> trying to get by on about $30,000 a year.
>
> And you go, this is just this is this is just absurd. and I don’t
> think the artificial intelligence is going to be used to remedy that
> situation. Perhaps don’t. Going to have to come from somewhere else.
> And I don’t know quite where it is. I think actually the alternative
> currencies are I think this is just the fly by night thing and I just
> it’s likely to disappear in three or four years but we’ll see.
>
> *RH: Thank you very much David Harvey. Thank you for coming on do your
> own research.*
>
> DH: Well thank you very much for the conversation. It gives me a great
> deal of pleasure that you at least got something out of the book. I
> think that’s terrific. I’m glad I hope that I hope that people can use
> it right because each chapter is relatively short and doesn’t cover
> everything and people should do a lot of work to go further with it.
>
> *RH: Yes, it’s incredibly clear and actually extremely easy to read. *
>
> Oh, good. Good. That was the holy grail as well. Thank you. Okay.
> Right. Thank you.
>
> ***
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8qIDbcG6P4
>
> *Conversatorio con el doctor David Harvey *
>
> Facultad de Filosofía y Letras UNAM <https://www.youtube.com/@filos_unam>
>
> 17 Apr 2026
>
> Palacio de la Autonomía, Primo de Verdad 2, Centro Histórico, CDMX.
>
> David Harvey, destacado geógrafo y científico social, catedrático en
> la City University of New York.
>
> Thanks very much for having me here and inviting me to talk about
> artificial intelligence. It is a not very intelligent thing to do, at
> first. Frankly, I don’t like it. I’m trying to get away from it. And I
> have at the same time, a huge wave of speculative thinking about it.
> The only thing I thought I could do in relationship to it is to look
> at the role of technological innovations and transformations in the
> history of capitalism.
>
> Now obviously when we look backwards we see all manner of technology
> and innovations which are changing the world. And this is the
> industrial revolution and right the way through, and there’s a certain
> pattern that occurs in terms of my lived experience. I think that the
> coming of the internet in the 1990s was a very good example of what I
> want to talk about. Now the pattern is largely this, and a new
> innovation comes on.
>
> There’s a very interesting passage in my favorite book, which is
> Marx’s /Capital/, where Marx is talking about the thinking of a
> bourgeois philosopher John Stuart Mill. John Stuart Mill confessed
> himself to be confused and agitated by the fact that society had come
> up with all kinds of new innovations and particularly machine
> technologies and that these innovations actually held up the
> possibility of everybody in the world receiving whatever they needed
> to lead a decent steady life.
>
> And the literature about the machines of course was double-edged, but
> it was largely welcomed as having this very positive possibility. but
> John Stuart Mill said experience showed by the time of the middle of
> the 19th century that actually, what the machines did, was to increase
> the rate of exploitation of labor, to make the living standards of the
> mass of the population worse.
>
> So how come this wonderful innovation had such negative consequences
> for the mass of the population? Marx picks this up and talks about
> this and says, ‘well it’s obvious, it’s because the machines are used
> by capitalists to build capital and they’re used to exploit labor. So
> of course innovations of the sort that have been talked about then
> have a negative consequence even though they rest on a positive
> possibility.’
>
> And this is something which I’ve written about in the recent book
> quite a lot, which is double consciousness. This arose philosophically
> very much with the African-American intellectuals at the beginning of
> the last century who found themselves in a situation where with all of
> the racial discrimination, all the negative things, of going to Europe
> and finding Europeans talking about North America in ways that they
> could not stand and had to defend.
>
> This is the double consciousness because on the one hand at home they
> were fighting a race war. But globally, they were apologists for the
> power and wisdom of the United States. So these are the sorts of
> things that are there. And why I mentioned the 1990s was this was a
> time when the internet came in and it was actually an incredible time.
> Every anarchist friend I have – and yes, as a Marxist, I do have
> anarchist friends – every anarchist friend said this is the new
> system. And the new world is going to come up with all of the
> innovations that were occurring in the 1990s. There was a
> techno-utopian movement. How can we use this in ways which are
> beneficial to the whole of humankind?
>
> And that period lasted 10 years in the same way that John Stuart
> Mills’ thinking lasted about 10 years. And then it suddenly seemed
> that this new system was about monopoly control, about authoritarian
> compliance, with necessity. We started to move into a new world where
> all of the negatives started to come into play. And look at the
> situation right now. We are actually dealing with the fact that
> abstractions – and Marx also makes this point – that there comes a
> point where we’re no longer governed by people. We’re governed by
> abstractions. And the abstractions are what you see on your television
> screen.
>
> And right now, right now, you look and you kind of say how astonishing
> it is that these new techniques which were beginning to arise at the
> end of the 1990s have now evolved into something which is a
> revolutionary situation. But it’s a revolutionary situation in which
> there is almost total monopoly control by big capital. And big capital
> can exercise monopoly control not only over just daily life, but can
> do so in such a way that we are governed by that as an abstraction. We
> live with that abstraction.
>
> And then the big issue arises for political people. How do you fight
> an abstraction? How do we do it? It’s because there’s no, you know, in
> the good old days, you took your pitchfork and you marched on the
> castle and you hit somebody. You can’t even see where the power, the
> abstraction, is coming from.
>
> But we need to analyze the power of these abstractions. And what Marx
> does, as he did with John Stuart Mill, is he has a very good notion of
> how to think about the world with this notion of double consciousness.
> In a book called /The Grundrisee, /what he did was to start to talk
> through what is really entailed in a revolutionary change. And there
> are about three pages in the /Grundrisse /where he talks about the
> marvels that come through in the industrial revolution and the
> technological revolution in general, the coming of the steam engine
> and the like.
>
> And the double consciousness comes because in those two or three pages
> he started to talk about the kind of science that you needed to run a
> steam engine and science itself had to be incorporated in the machine.
>
> So knowledge gets suddenly significantly incorporated within machine
> technologies and all of that is creating all of these incredible
> possibilities, that the whole of humanity could live. All the needs,
> in terms of food, clothing, housing and the like. All those needs
> could be met by the technologies there.
>
> So that we don’t dismiss the technology. I’m inclined to try to
> dismiss artificial intelligence. I wish it would go away. But it’s
> here and it’s going to be used and it has these potentialities in
> areas like medical care, and all the rest of it. There are fantastic
> possibilities. In many ways, the fact that I’m still alive has a lot
> to do with the medical technologies which have arisen from the 1990s
> onwards.
>
> So these sorts of things have tremendous positive possibilities, but
> me still being alive is not necessarily regarded by my enemies as a
> good one. So this is the one side of it.
>
> The second side of it is that Marx suddenly talks about exactly the
> same phenomena but sees them as alienated. And we live in a world of
> universal alienation and I’ve written copiously on that topic.
> Universal alienation in which the capacities and powers are taken away
> from us, so that we are no longer able to be active participants, that
> we are simply going to end up being machine minders, rather that
> thinkers and doers and all the rest of it.
>
> But a small group of people will be thinkers and doers. But for the
> rest, it’s a toxic environment, a toxic environment characterized by
> mass alienation, universal alienation. And the point here is this. You
> can say there are all these negative things and then there are all
> these positive things. And many people then say, well, it’s very
> simple. You just embrace the positive things and ban and outlaw the
> negative things.
>
> Big mistake. You can’t do it because the bad stuff is already
> incorporated in the good stuff and the good stuff is already
> incorporated in the bad stuff. So when we look about what the
> possibilities are going to be for a new form of urbanization and the
> like, I think it’s going to have to be about the good stuff and the
> bad stuff and we have to be prepared to deal with both.
>
> But understanding double consciousness gives us a position where we
> can actually start to transform what is going on around us through
> these technological innovations and through organizational shifts and
> forms through geopolitical configurations which are novel and new and
> all the rest of it.
>
> Just out of curiosity, I thought I would ask ChatGPT what kind of
> world would be produced given my analysis of the nature of capital.
> There came back a very good answer, which said, ‘well this is a
> difficult question. I don’t really have a great answer for it, but
> here is what it seems it would be our society will be moving towards.
> A situation where a small percent of the world’s population, that’s
> say 10%, can live a wonderful life in wonderful surroundings and
> incredible metropolitan environments. That small group will be the
> techno engineers who control the engineering structures and they will
> be able to do whatever they want. They will have total freedom to
> impose whatever they want upon everybody else.’
>
> The 90% of the population will have almost nothing beyond what Miguel
> was mentioning: a universal basic income which is what Silicon Valley
> is looking at, because Silicon Valley recognizes it needs to maintain
> a consumer base to its form of capital, a consumer base that is
> sufficient to absorb all of the product which is going to be generated
> through artificial intelligence.
>
> That was what the artificial intelligence folk suggested would be the
> case. I myself am less pessimistic. Everybody at some point every
> takes every innovation that comes along and says, ‘Oh, it’s making
> labor redundant. It has negative consequences. It’s alienating, etc.,
> etc., etc.’
>
> But every innovation actually has a tail. It starts off optimistic.
> Then the reality of pessimistic action comes into play. But then
> people find some new ways even amongst those who are on basic income.
> They start to find new forms of relating, creating new forms of
> economy. And artificial intelligence can’t stop them. It’s not a
> willfull-like act. At that point will there be a resurrection of the
> positive consequences, but the positive consequences will never
> eradicate the negative.
>
> So that is the world to which we will be moving and I think it’s a
> kind of urbanization that into which we are already finding ourselves
> dragging in my own work, I came across a very surprising
> contradiction. And the idea of contradiction is to me foundational, as
> it was to Marx. He says in /The Grundrisse/ at one point, well, of
> course, I’m interested in the analysis of contradiction. The trouble
> is that Ricardo can’t stand contradictions and will not tolerate them.
> And therefore, whenever he encounters a contradiction he pushes it off.
>
> We tend to be working with a Ricardian thinking when we should be
> thinking with Marx’s thinking, because what Marx shows is that capital
> is not a system which actually gives you equilibrium, as all the
> economists like to think. It in fact generates disequilibrium within
> itself. And it does so by so transforming how labor is being used and
> the productivity of labor that it actually makes more and more labor
> redundant. And as labor becomes redundant, so the value circulating in
> society diminishes.
>
> And in fact what Marx suggested was that left to itself capital would
> be a transitory period, maybe a century or more, before the real stuff
> – socialist society – could start to be constructed.
>
> So Marx, then, is talking about contradictions and the fact that the
> contradictions are not coming from outside. They are internal to the
> dynamic. Capital makes its own contradictions.
>
> The simplest version of it says there’ll be a falling rate of profit.
> The rate of profit went high in the 19th century. It’s down down. And
> when the profit rate gets to zero, that will be the end for capital.
> So if the profit rate does that, then you say, ‘who is forcing the
> profit rate down? Who is making all of those innovations which make
> labor redundant?’
>
> And the answer is capital is making them and they’re making them not
> because they want to, but because the capitalists are always facing
> what Marx calls the coercive laws of competition. If I have a better
> technology than you, you’re out of the out of the game. Therefore, you
> get a better technology than me and I’m out of the game.
>
> Technological innovation is something which is inherent within
> capital. It is structurally there. It’s going to be there. That’s
> where artificial intelligence came from. People looking for some
> advantage in their little corner and then turning it into a whole
> transformation of the way in which society works.
>
> This raises what is for me the fantastic and wonderful question which
> is who is going to save capital from the capitalists. Think about it.
> You have a theory of economics which is equilibrium. Well, I can’t get
> a crisis there. But actually we live through crisis in 2007-08. And
> the economist didn’t know how to deal with it. Didn’t know how to
> understand it. Contemporary economics doesn’t understand foundational
> questions of contradictions.
>
> Go to the economics textbooks, see if you find the term contradiction
> anywhere. The answer is nowhere. Marx is saying we live in a
> contradiction. We have to work with the contradictions. And part of
> the contradiction, is to build something which is useful for people,
> rather than not useful for people. And there’s a fantastic passage in
> Marx where he’s talking about fixed capital. Machinery is a good
> example, but we’re also talking about the built environment and
> everything else.
>
> Capital is fixed in the environment, in the built environment. It’s
> invested in the machines. So you have this capital which is actually
> promoting an increase in the productivity of labor and you have this
> system which in so doing produces conditions which in the end, can
> lead to the failure of capital to persist. So people find themselves
> dealing with crisis.
>
> And again and again throughout the history of capital we see crisis.
> 2007-08 was a major crisis. We’ve got lots of little crises around
> right now, and there is the problem of how nationalism is getting
> involved, and all of the geopolitical consequences of that. But who
> will provide the solution?
>
> And it’s interesting, actually. I found two quotations about this. One
> is from Roosevelt who said, ‘I am committed to save capital from the
> capitalists.’ The other person who said it was Keynes. But Keynes is
> wiped out of the academy. But Keynes said, ‘look, we have to create
> institutional arrangements which save capital from capital.’
>
> And of course much of what the post-war era was about was setting up
> institutional arrangements which would do that. The trouble is they
> started to think about the kind of economics, and it was Ricardian
> economics. It was a Ricardian economics which wasn’t going to go
> anywhere except to actually affirm the fact that capital was
> vulnerable to serious crisis.
>
> But the serious crisis could sometimes be extended, by taking the
> capital that you had and putting it into fixed capital. Build a big
> building that lasts 200 years. So more and more capital started to
> move into fixed capital and the fixed capital it moved into improved
> the productivity of labor.
>
> For instance, the United States took a lot of its capital surpluses
> and built the interstate [highway] system. It also built suburbs. This
> absorbed vast amounts of capital. This was a great boondoggle for
> capital. And after World War II, that was one of the big solutions to
> the crisis tendency of capitalism. Build highways. Build suburbs. More
> building with no mind, whatsoever, for the environmental consequences
> with the result that the United States has an environmental set of
> problems which are almost entirely due to absorbing surplus capital
> through suburbanization.
>
> So one of the things we have to do is to see that there’s these
> connectivities and then say, ‘well how do we actually deal with the
> situation right now?’ And Marx writes a little thing where he says,
> ‘the new machines and all of that produces a great increase in the
> productivity of labor, but in order to do that you have to take
> capital out of circulation from, right now, and invest it in something
> which is longlasting.’
>
> The machine lasts 10 years. The built environment lasts maybe 30 or 40
> years. And Marx says, ‘the surpluses which are extracted from daily
> consumption in order to build the new cities all over the place, those
> surpluses are very important to take away from current consumption, in
> order to raise the productivity.’ But if the productivity arises too
> high, then in fact, you end up with more surpluses.
>
> So, says Marx, the situation arises in which the only way capital can
> preserve itself is to actually invest in things which don’t matter.
> And he has two sets of things that don’t matter.
>
> One is war. So capitalists love war. They don’t invent wars. They
> leave that to others to invent. But once the war is invented, why do
> they have a good time? Marx says war is equivalent to tipping value
> into the ocean. It’s total waste. Everything that we might want to do
> is curtailed because we want to tip all this value into the ocean.
>
> So this is the kind of thing you find is a macro situation in which a
> lot of wasteful investment is absolutely necessary to absorb the
> surpluses of capital. The mass of capital now is incredible. Think of
> it. In 1950, the total value of goods and services in the global
> economy was estimated by the World Bank to be around $9 trillion. Just
> before COVID struck, the last time I did looked at this, it’s $90
> trillion. An economy of $90 worth of commodities trying to circulate
> around, and find some investment. It is doing things on the consumer
> side which are absolutely phenomenal, because there’s all that
> surplus. You need to find it the market. Look how markets are working.
> We have fast fashion, and it used to be you know fashions changed
> yearly then they change seasonally now they change weekly.
>
> Everything is moving faster, and we are increasingly developing
> economies which rest not on the production of goods – because goods
> last a long time and the turnover time is too long – you want
> something that is instantaneous. So I turn to what is instantaneous,
> is experience.
>
> Capitalists no longer invest in producing commodities, they produce
> experiences. Tourism is one of the central means for doing that. And
> we have tourist movements all over the world and anti-tourist
> movements all over the world. And we don’t know what to do about
> tourism and Airbnb and all the rest of it.
>
> That all exists in a context in a macroeconomic context. in which
> there is so much surplus capital around, that nobody knows what to do
> with it except find modes of consumption which are instantaneous and
> Marx has a kind of comment kind of says the optimal turnover time for
> consumer goods is zero.
>
> So what is the World Cup all about? It’s also about spectacle and it’s
> fantastic when you start to look at it, And I used to watch soccer a
> lot, and the people there playing soccer back in 1950 got a working
> man’s wage and now over the last 20 or 30 years and the neoliberal
> period in particular, all the major forms of soccer and entertainment
> and all the rest of it have been monetized up to the hilt.
>
> So that we have a cultural shift which is about speed up of turnover
> and you kind of say well, a Taylor Swift concert is just the same, and
> it’s part of this process. So you then say, well these moves by
> capital now connect, and run into all of this stuff about artificial
> intelligence. And it is being monetized up to the hilt.
>
> And look how it’s now monetized. When we first started to get these
> platforms and we could get different kinds of films on on on the
> telly. When that came along, I found that was quite interesting. And
> there were about three or four platforms. Switch on the telly now.
> Platforms, platforms, platforms, platforms, platforms.
>
> And you have to purchase membership in order to look at that. But
> think about that not as something that just happened. You can describe
> that it’s happened. But what I’m interested in is why it happened. And
> if we don’t deal with why it happened, which has everything to do with
> actually dealing with the nature of contemporary capital, which is not
> the same as it was 50 years ago, 30 years ago.
>
> Dealing with the nature of contemporary capital and actually gutting
> contemporary capital and stopping it getting into these kinds of
> transformations. And the trouble right now is that the system that is
> doing these transformations, it controls all of the media, controls
> all the rest of it. And they won’t like very much any kind of movement
> along those lines. But I think a lot of people would actually say,
> listen, this is the kind of thing that we can do something about.
>
> But right now, a tremendous concentration of monopoly power I mean,
> it’s interesting. Neoliberalism was very much about unleashing
> competition. Marx comments that the fiercer is the competition, the
> quicker you approach monopoly. We’ve now got a monopoly economy. We’ve
> now, you know, given up on the coercive laws of competition. And we’ve
> also got the fact that the more these forms of innovation which we’re
> getting are authoritarian – in the sense that they are excelling in
> surveillance and the like – so that picture I had from artificial
> intelligence as to what the urbanism and the future was, if we keep
> going the way we’re going – that is, it seems to me something that has
> to be placed an embargo on. And we just need to do something different.
>
> Meanwhile, we’ve got to find ways to meet human needs. I talked about
> the monetization of all of the sports networks, for example. All of
> the big money is now taking it over. When I first arrived in the
> United States, I would go to a ball game and it it cost almost
> nothing. Now it costs the earth.
>
> These transformations are going to be embedded in our urban practices
> because capital is building cities and capital is building cities in
> many respects because it can’t find anything better to do. And even
> when it builds cities, if you could have even changed just quarter of
> it into something else, we would have a much better set of social
> services.
>
> But this is the sort of discussion we need to have, to connect these
> macro things. And I’m not doing too good a job of describing what is
> going on. I tried to do this in the book: for once, we’ve got this
> understanding of where we are and what we’re about and we give up on
> all of the fancy sort of stuff that comes down from economists and
> everybody else about how the system will work, and we’ll produce
> equilibrium. We’ve had all those people in the Treasury and so on, and
> think about equilibrium economics all the time.
>
> Marx is about disequilibrium. And what produces disequilibrium within
> Marxism is far more useful to understand, than it is to understand try
> and understand bourgeois economics. And this is one of the paradoxes,
> of course: the capitalists want to read Marx because it’s Marx. And
> when in fact the best thing that can keep them alive is to have a good
> dose of Marx and actually learn how to protect capital from capitalism.
>
> Okay. So, why don’t I read it there? But, I could go on for hours, but
> you’ll probably get bored. So, leave it there. Thank you.
>
> QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
>
> I’m thinking how the housing market constantly is offering smaller and
> smaller places for living and that has changed the traditional family.
> Now we see more and more single couples with kids or people living
> alone. So not only in housing market but how the infrastructure of
> capitalism changes the way of living, and then our way of living
> generates the market for even more precarious infrastructure from
> capitalism.
>
> one of the things I often suggest to students is in fact was very
> critical in my movement towards embracing Marx was to read the
> /Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844/ because there you will
> find Marx talking more explicitly about alienation, about species
> being. The species’ capacities and powers, themes which sometimes come
> back in /Capital /when he poses the question, and in a sense, creates
> a sort of critical figure in his mind.
>
> Which is why it might be called the sophisticated laborer or the
> emancipated laborer whose task isn’t to only understand how the system
> works, but also help other people understand that, collectively, they
> can make something very different. So this I think is something
> important to try to incorporate if you like an unalienated version of
> urban life. And in doing that we have to recognize that double
> consciousness I talked about.
>
> But also recognize that Marx took the idea of political consciousness
> from daily experience, that our political consciousness is not
> something that descends from heaven. It is something that is actually
> built up through daily experience. And then that probably closes the
> kind of question of how can political movements in the city acquire
> the kind of consciousness which is actually going to be transformative
> in the way in which the city works, meeting social wants and needs.
>
> Now, one of the things that I would remind you of that I have worked
> with the notion of the right to the city. There is an approach to the
> right to the city which is an abstract approach. You know, it’s in the
> schema of human rights. They have the right to the city. The trouble
> with this is that those who exercise the right to the city are usually
> the rich. We had a billionaire mayor of New York who did a lot of
> positive things for New York, making New York into a perfect city for
> the billionaire class. He was exercising his right to the city.
>
> My version of the right to the city is radically different and a poor
> person living in the Bronx is going to have a different view. But what
> Lefebvre does with the idea of right to the city is to say it’s not
> the right to the city that matters. It’s the fact that he says there
> is a cry and a demand for social justice in the city. Which is why I
> wrote this book on /Social Justice and the City. /
>
> We should therefore think of social justice in the city in
> relationship to, think of it as a cry and a demand that it only makes
> sense to me to be actively involved in a right to the city movement
> when I am with the kinds of people who need an alternative city. And
> there are plenty of people in need of that alternative city.
>
> There is a cry and demand for it and that therefore it is the cry and
> the demand which animates us in trying to create an urban alternative.
> Within that urban alternative there is a serious problem which, at the
> same time as this challenge, can also alter radically the way in which
> we approach the question of rebuilding the city in a different image.
>
> That is we start to identify all of those wasteful aspects of
> urbanization. By wasteful, I’m not saying those things that have no
> cultural significance. I’m meaning, you know, just buying up pieces of
> the city to rent it out. Now, we have this crazy guy, president of the
> United States, and he did, interestingly, say something which I
> actually agreed with. He said, "One of the big problems right now is
> that the billionaire class can’t find places to invest. And one of the
> things they’re doing is they’re buying up owner housing, private
> housing, and they’re converting it into rentals which earn them a
> great income.”
>
> In other words, this is what I would call accumulation by
> dispossession. There is an attack going on right now, an attack on the
> individual property owner and the billionaires are buying up the
> housing. And Trump said he didn’t think this was a good idea and they
> should pass legislation banning billionaires from buying up owner
> occupied housing and converting it into rentals.
>
> Now if he did that and really set that. You know I deplored him
> because that is one of one of the big problems. But again this is in a
> context when you’ve got a billionaire class. I mean people like Musk
> live with $40 trillion or something like that in their pockets. We
> we’ve got this situation where we can’t, they can’t, find decent
> things to invest in.
>
> So they are really playing at this idea of spending all their money
> going to outer space. But in order to get housing which is available
> for the mass of the population, we need to actually stop this buying
> up and this advancing of rentals. And rentals are turning out to be
> very profitable.
>
> So you have to find ways to check it and there are ways to check it
> legally and by activism in the city councils and things like that. But
> this is again something which is an urgent matter, that the affordable
> housing that does exist is disappearing, and it’s being turned into
> speculative housing.
>
> Nonprofits which were providing affordable housing are being bought up
> by the large insurance companies. And so what you’re finding is well
> Miguel knows more about this than I do. So what you find is a
> transformation which is very much based upon the fact that the
> billionaires are having a hard time finding things to invest in which
> are profitable for them and so they’ll turn anything into a profit.
> They’ve done it with you know the sports leagues and all this kind of
> thing.
>
> So it’s a general monetization and capitalization of everything and it
> is at a level right now which is really what Marx used the word which
> is truly ‘monstrous,’ that capital is in its monster phase. And I
> think that that that we should bear that in mind when we try to find
> even detailed questions on how are we going to deal with housing in
> this corner of the world.
>
> One other point I would want to make. A lot of the time we work with
> universal truth. What we find – and I had a whole chapter in the book
> about this – what we find in practice is that even Marx was not
> working with the universal. What Marx does is to build a theory of the
> capitalist mode of production on the basis of the experience of
> Manchester. And the theory he builds is therefore fixed, if you like,
> rooted in the Manchester experience.
>
> And of course, it’s a fantastic book. But then you say to yourself, I
> wonder what book Marx might have written if he lived in Birmingham.
> Because Birmingham didn’t have cotton mills, didn’t have cotton
> industrialization. It was still an artisinal society, building with
> engineering, making guns and jewelry and all kinds of things like
> that. The labor force was skilled in a way that the cotton industry
> wasn’t. So in fact what we really needed to do was to start to think
> about the divergences that occur in within the global situation.
>
> I don’t think this form of capital is Euroentric. It’s
> Americanoentric. And I don’t think Europe has much to say about all
> this artificial intelligence. And then this also points to the fact
> that capital takes different forms in different places and that there
> are varieties of capitalism. There are varieties which are more
> pleasurable to live in, easier to live in than others. And we should
> recognize that.
>
> But the universality of capital is what is going on at the global
> level and that therefore there is a global theory to be written as to
> what capital is doing. But that global theory needs to be visited upon
> the different forms that capital takes in different parts of the world.
>
> So it’s not a question of Euroentric, or Latin America versus Europe
> or something like that. It’s a question of what form is capital taking
> in this particularly geographical configuration. Those are the sorts
> of things that seem to me to be important and they’re all very different.
>
> There’s a great deal of variety even within the wealthy countries.
> There’s a great deal of variety in the poor countries. But there is a
> universal theoretical framework that can be responsive to all the
> particularity that exists. One of the problems geographers often have
> is to deal with particularity. Everything in geography is particular.
> This place is not like that place. Everything is different.
>
> And people then say there can’t be a general theory. I say, well, no,
> that’s not the case. It’s a bit like DNA. Turns out everybody has a
> different DNA. Everybody is particular. On the other hand, the
> universality of DNA is such that if you could commit a crime in
> Australia, people could take your DNA and you’re living in the United
> States, and track you down. So there’s a universal aspect to DNA at
> the same time as there’s a close attention to individuality and
> particularity.
>
> So one of the things that geographers are very good at, and I hope
> you’ve listened to the geographers on this is precisely about how to
> actually think globally about the geographical difference and
> geographical variation…
>
> MORE QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
>
> Start with the last point about contradiction. Marx builds his
> analysis on contradictions. It’s not something it’s not something you
> can abolish. The only way you can get rid of the contradictions of
> capital is to get rid of capital. All the time you have capital,
> you’re going to have contradictions which are specific to the
> capitalist system. But in fact, Marx builds his whole argument
> relationally through contradictions.
>
> For instance, the first concept in Marx’s capital is commodity. But
> says Marx, there’s two faces to the commodity: use value and exchange
> value. There’s a contradiction. I mean, what you do with your
> commodity depends upon whether you treat it as a thing, a use value,
> or as an exchange value and they’re exclusionary. If you use a
> commodity, you can’t sell it. If you sell it, you can’t use it.
>
> Now Marx goes on like this. There are two kinds of labor. Concrete
> labor, abstract labor, relative value, absolute value. You go on right
> throughout capital and you just find this kind of whole chain of
> contradictions which are feeding into each other. And contradictions
> are not like problems. Problems you can solve, contradictions you can
> simply manage.
>
> People find it a bit difficult but if you say the simple analogy of
> this, is I have a perpetual contradiction between having to do things
> like this going and sitting outside and having a good time. Most
> people find themselves in a situation where in order to earn money
> they have to do certain things which are contradictory to what they
> would really like to do.
>
> The contradictions can sometimes of course burn up and create
> individual crisis. I’m sure most of you have had some form of crisis
> over this kind of thing. But you manage them. I manage it by, you
> know, I sit down and watch something stupid on the television or
> whatever. I can do that every now and again. I do.
>
> So contradictions are there, but they should be managed. We should be
> learning to manage the contradictions. So when there’s contradictions
> between social purpose and individual gain, for example, you may want
> to curb one side of the contradiction at to the advantage of another.
>
> One of the central contradictions which for me is central to Marx’s
> /Capital /is the contradiction between the rate of profit and the mass
> of profit. You can’t, you know, do that both of those things at the
> same time. But the rate of profit is of course very sensitive to the
> rate of exploitation which is sensitive to the productivity of labor
> and all that we’ve been talking about. So the rate is there, but in
> order to get the use values, we have to use that system.
>
> In other words, what capital is about is using the capitalist system
> to meet social wants and needs, which is what we’re talking about
> housing. We need housing. And the big question is, can you get
> housing, the use value of housing, by the normal procedures of
> exchange value formation which is monetized exchange. So can you do that?
>
> When I was working a lot on housing, it became very clear to me that
> for the top 50% of the population in a city like Baltimore, housing of
> the exchange value type, an exchange value, the market and all the
> rest of it worked quite well. But it was clear to me that 50% of the
> population could not get housing via market mechanisms.
>
> Therefore, you had to think about housing provision outside of the
> market. If you want the use value of housing for a low-inccome
> population that they can get the use value they need and want and all
> the rest of it, if you do that, then you have to find a way outside of
> the exchange value structures.
>
> Now the history of capital recently has been to monetize everything,
> to marketize everything, which of course leads into the fact that most
> people can’t afford most of the things that they would like to have,
> apart from those who have enough money to actually be middle class or
> who do fine.
>
> So contradictions are there to be managed and then the question rises
> who is going to do the managing. Which gets me back to the question
> who is going to save capital from capitalists, because one of the
> things capitalists are very good at is saying you have to solve the
> housing problem within the framework of market exchange and private
> property. That’s a sort of done deal in the United States which
> condemns the United States to a 50% rate of kind of unaffordable
> housing with the mass of the population.
>
> So you want to change it? Well, you’ve got to change that system. You
> got to find a mechanism to housing provision which is outside of the
> market where you will then find some state power. You might then find
> some state power, and you will then get into certain contradictions of
> the state. So the contradiction problem is always with us and it’s
> interesting to think about how contradictions interlock with each other.
>
> The idea of abstractions and how to deal with the abstractions again
> comes back closely to this question of contradictions. The
> abstractions always have together a certain contradiction. I mean the
> contradiction of capitalism, in relationship to private property, for
> example, that is there throughout the housing question.
>
> So we have to approach abstractions and you know seriously think how
> they are constructed. There are theoretical abstractions. I can
> manufacture a whole bunch of abstractions. But what Marx is trying to
> do is to actually talk about the historical materialist basis upon
> which certain abstractions begin to emerge and around which certain
> kinds of rules, laws, start to coalesce.
>
> So the abstractions of the market are of course foundational for
> capital even as and this is the interesting thing about this that
> capitalists themselves don’t like competition. We’re told that you
> know competition is sacrosanct, is one of the pillars of what capital
> is about. Capitalists hate competition. They prefer monopoly. They
> monopolize as fast as they can. And you know monopoly occurs in all
> kinds of ways.
>
> So that again when you start to put abstractions together with
> contradictions, it’s about what are the primary contradictions of
> capital and what are the minor contradictions and how can we actually
> utilize our understanding of the contradictions to manage them more
> coherently to achieve social purpose. Thank you.
>
> ***
>
> /2 June 2026/
>
> https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/22705_the-story-of-capital-what-everyone-should-know-about-how-capital-works-by-david-harvey-reviewed-by-matt-mcmanus/
>
> *David Harvey
> <https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/book-authors/david-harvey/>*
> /The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital
> Works
> <https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/book/22703_the-story-of-capital-what-everyone-should-know-about-how-capital-works/>/
>
>
> Verso Books, London, 2026. 400 pp., $34.95 hb
> *ISBN* 9781836742111
> <http://books.google.co.uk/books?q=isbn+9781836742111>
>
>
> Reviewed by Matt McManus
> <https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewer/21503_matt-mcmanus/>
>
> Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Spelman
> College and the author of …
>
> More <https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewer/21503_matt-mcmanus/>
>
> For many of us, David Harvey was our introduction to Marxism. Whether
> it was the seminal course on /Capital /that went viral after the
> recession, his famous books on postmodernism or neoliberalism, or the
> giant tomes introducing Marx’s major works—everyone had an entry
> point. In my case it was 2015 at the Birkbeck critical theory summer
> school. I attended Harvey’s lectures as a 20-something graduate
> student. Not only did they blow me away, but I was struck by his
> kindness, respect and availability. After the talks, Harvey would
> inevitably head upstairs to grab a few beers (more than a few for the
> younger crowd). He’d happily discuss, debate or explain the material
> as you wished it. Harvey was the true model of a left wing
> intellectual. Smart, vastly erudite and creative but always
> democratic, considerate and open to dialogue. And so he’s remained.
>
> Academically, Harvey made his name developing Marxism as a theoretical
> paradigm within a very Kantian and positivist inflected geography.
> Harvey was fascinated by Marx’s descriptions of how seemingly alien
> historical processes recrafted the world around us; as Marx put it in
> the /Grundrisse/, bringing the globe closer together through the
> annihilation of space by time. Since then, Harvey’s contributions have
> been voluminous: countless papers, girthy books, lectures, critical
> primers, you name it. Some of these were highly speculative. /Justice,
> Nature and the Geography of Difference /dives into the philosophy of
> nature, dialoging with Heidegger, Whitehead and more on the ontology
> of reality itself. Some of them feel ripped from the headlines. /A
> Brief History of Neoliberalism /has become a classic critical
> introduction to the topic, following Marx in making clear how
> economics is about a lot more than just economics.
>
> Then there are Harvey’s major works of Marxology: the /Companion to
> Marx’s Capital /and /Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse. /Marxists tend to
> be a prickly bunch, especially about the maestro’s work and how to
> interpret it. It’s hard to think of anyone who buys into Harvey’s
> reading wholesale. But it’s also hard to think of anyone who has
> engaged Marx as thoroughly as Harvey does.
>
> Harvey’s recent book, /The Story of Capital/, reads very much like a
> coda to his reconstruction, what he calls the ‘Marx project’ in the
> preface (ix). Where the earlier companions dive deep into specific
> books, the goal of /The Story of Capital /is summative. Harvey argues
> that ‘capital’s totality is an organic system in perpetual evolution.’
> (3) The goal is to understand this totality in all its moving and
> changing parts, and above all else the relations between them. This is
> a key point Harvey has been stressing since at least /Justice, Nature
> and the Geography of Difference/. He points out that Marx, following
> Hegel, doesn’t understand social causality the way a bourgeois
> philosopher might. It’s not the case that A causes B which in turn
> leads to C. This aligns with a natural and social ontology that starts
> from perceiving the world as a collection of separate individuals and
> then describes social laws as an emergent feature. By contrast, Marx’s
> view of causality is relational and mutual. A effects B and is
> recursively effected in turn. Consider an extending root structure
> which draws nutrients from the earth and air, while in turn reshaping
> the soil structure and atmosphere as it grows into a tree. It is a
> holistic ontology. Moreover, over time this relationship itself can
> become independently impactful through alienation, which leads to
> reification.
>
> Harvey points out that Marx applied these dialectical considerations
> to capitalism. For Marx,
>
> [the] totality of capital’s inner structure exists within [the]
> much broader totality of capitalism as a social formation. Marx’s
> reason for conceptualizing this distinction between mode of
> production and social formation is that he sees the mode of
> capital’s production as the economic engine, the foundational
> powerhouse, the source of abstract forces, to which all of us who
> live under the regime of capital are willy-nilly obligated. (13)
>
> But where Hegel’s idealist ontology was conceived to be infinite and
> absolute, Marx continuously stresses the all too human finitude and
> contingency of our social totality. This doesn’t mean it is closed off
> from the infinitude of nature. Harvey points out there are
> methodological questions one must ask about when it makes sense to
> consider the social totality independently of nature, much as a doctor
> might consider the human body ‘as a working totality for purposes of
> medical investigation.’ (17). Harvey doesn’t solve this problem, and
> it is probably irresolvable for any social scientific investigation.
>
> The bulk of the book is taken up by following Marx in creating a
> ‘mental map’ of capital. This means abstracting moments of the social
> totality out from their broader place within the system to investigate
> them independently, before refitting them into the bigger picture. To
> go back to the medical analogy, one can’t understand the heart without
> looking at circulation, and beyond that neurology, etc. But that
> doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to abstractly examine the ventricles of
> the heart independently for a while to gain a more granular understanding.
>
> /The Story of Capital /canvasses a vast number of such abstracted
> moments. The history of capitalist dispossession is given a thoughtful
> chapter that fleshes out the relationship between capitalism, the
> state and violence. One insight Harvey offers is that the dialectical
> relationship between capital, the state and coercion is a fluid one
> that can change the configuration of capital at any given time. For
> example, bankers and merchants can ‘exploit their position in the
> circulation of capital to accumulate capital on their own account’ and
> bend the legal system to facilitate their rise. In those
> circumstances, the productive sphere of capitalism can become less
> significant. If the ‘credit system is flagrantly used to bolster the
> wealth and power of the investment bankers (such as Goldman Sachs or
> JP Morgan) or speculative property companies (like Blackstone),
> instead of supporting value and surplus value production, the theory
> of capital circulation and accumulation needs extensive revision’
> (266). This seems a worthwhile point to ponder in a context where most
> Americans claim to be struggling just to make ends meet and GDP growth
> is stagnant, and yet the stock market continues to do well.
>
> The chapter ‘The Production of Space, Time and Place’ is naturally a
> winner, returning to topics Harvey has weighed in on since the 1970s.
> Harvey continues to stress how capital is in a constant race to
> compress space through time, pushing technological dynamism especially
> in fields like transportation and communication. Relative ‘space-times
> are perpetually shifting because of technological changes in the
> ability to traverse space in less and less time. While it took several
> weeks for the news of George Washington’s death in Mount Vernon in
> Virginia to get to Ohio, such an event would be known within minutes
> via cable news today’ (145). Harvey is also uniquely interested in
> place and geography as a means of pursuing an emancipatory socialist
> project. This has always been one of the more interesting, and
> practical dimensions of his thought. Most of us tend to think of
> systemic, intellectualized ways of moving past the capitalist mode of
> production. Harvey has always thought that we’ll know socialism by the
> new kinds of neighborhoods and cities it creates.
>
> The struggles over what kind of place we inhabit and what kind of
> people we want to be is a form of general political and social
> struggle that is central to what socialist consciousness must embrace.
> It is oppositional to the alienated and exclusionary nationalism that
> frequently attaches to the toxic form of developmentalism that too
> often corrupts anticapitalist politics. (156)
>
> Far from writing more recipe books for the cook shops of the future,
> let alone criticizing the critical critics, Harvey’s imperative here
> is to think through the kind of very practical (dare I say wonkish?)
> questions socialist theorists usually avoid. We need to see the inner
> radicalness in street and interior design. This seems unusually
> poignant right now when for the first time in years, a self-described
> socialist mayor is in charge of one of the world’s major metropolis
> and has committed to building a city for all New Yorkers.
>
> If there is anything dissatisfying about Harvey’s book its how
> incomplete it feels. There are many moments throughout when he calls
> for further study, recommends interrogating this or that problem more
> thoroughly, or suggests theorizing a problem that’s unresolved.
> Sometimes it leaves the book feeling a bit like a fleshed-out research
> proposal. At the same time, it’s a testament to Harvey intellectual
> honesty that he refuses to hypostasize closure where there is none.
> More to the point, it seems to me that Marxism itself as a materialist
> philosophy precludes such resolution. There is no terminus point for
> understanding the social totality, because it is ever changing. This
> has always struck me as the odd thing about very dogmatic Marxists.
> Marx himself was anything but dogmatic, constantly changing his views
> over time. And this was appropriate when studying a system that by his
> own account was the most transformative, dynamic and potentially
> destructive the world has yet seen. Harvey has clearly internalized
> this sensibility and that’s an honorable position to take.
>
> /The Story of Capital /ends on a surprisingly serene, even modest
> note, with a short text on Pierro Sraffa. At the conclusion, Harvey
> reminisces about his life:
>
> So here I am, in my ninetieth year, looking back on my career as a
> geographer interested in explaining, with a little help from Marx,
> how urbanization and uneven development work, finding myself
> obliged to some extraordinary scholars, such as Sraffa and
> Robinson; and to people, events and political currents that open
> doors to new ways of thinking, hopefully more adequate to confront
> the central contradictions of our times. It is, however, one thing
> to open doors but quite enough to pass through en masse, to
> explore what might exist on the other side. The American empire
> that has sheltered capital for so long is starting to crack. This
> is a moment of opportunity as well as of peril. A little bit of
> optimism of the intellect is called for, if only to jump-start the
> optimism of the will. (361)
>
> I have to admit that I was deeply touched by this because of how
> deeply Harvey has touched many of our lives. Everyone has their
> arguments and disagreements with him. I remember him getting into
> prickly debates with countless feminists, post-modernists and
> Hegelians over that halcyon summer in Birbeck. My future wife and I
> previewed many of our later debates sparring over which of his
> positions were right and wrong. But looking back, I can say that what
> Harvey gave every leftist in the room was a bit of that optimism of
> the intellect to jump start our optimism of the will. He made us think
> a better world was possible. There’s no higher honor for a Marxist
> intellectual.
>
> ***
>
> https://triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/1891/1703
>
> *Capital’s Media, Digital Command, and the Fate of Public
> Communication: Reflections on David Harvey’s /The Story of Capital/*
>
> John W. Bessai, PhD
>
> Independent Scholar and Media Producer, Toronto, Canada,
> [email protected], https://www.johnbessai.com
>
> *Abstract:*David Harvey’s /The Story of Capital/ ofFfers a synthetic
> account of capital as a “working totality” organised through multiple,
> internally related circulation processes. Harvey’s treatment of
> technological dynamism, platform concentration, knowledge production,
> artificial intelligence, surveillance, higher education, media
> ownership, and the state-finance nexus provides the textual basis for
> a communication-centred reading of digital command and public
> communication. The 2018 tripleC debate among Harvey, Hardt, and Negri
> situates that communication thread within the journal’s own exchange
> on universal alienation, real subsumption, social cooperation,
> multiplicity, and praxis. Habermas enters where his account of
> steering media, communicative action, and the colonisation of the
> lifeworld clarifies the democratic consequences of media concentration
> and administrative filtering. Harvey’s book clarifies the connections
> among digital command, time-space compression, oligarchic media power,
> and the shrinking institutional conditions of public communication.
>
> *Keywords:*David Harvey, capital, communication, digital capitalism,
> alienation, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Jürgen Habermas, media,
> platform power, state-finance nexus, public sphere
>
>
> 1.Introduction
>
> David Harvey’s /The Story of Capital/ presents capital as a moving
> totality that joins production, circulation, social reproduction,
> finance, state power, technology, nature, and geopolitical rivalry.
> Harvey’s preface defines capital’s mode of production as a working
> totality built through the circulation of labour power, capital, and
> credit. The opening chapter then maps capital through “wages, profits,
> exchange, consumption, realization, rents, finance, merchant profits,
> interest and state functions” that dynamically intersect with one
> another (Harvey 2026, xi, 1). That totalising method creates the
> opening for a communication question.
>
> The communication question concerns the role of media, information
> infrastructures, software, surveillance, artificial intelligence,
> logistics, higher education, research institutions, and cultural
> circulation within capital’s movement. In critical communication
> studies and the critique of the political economy of communication and
> media, communication names a material and symbolic field in which
> labour, technology, ownership, ideology, public knowledge, and social
> struggle meet (Fuchs 2020; Knoche 2025). Networks move information and
> commodities. Platforms organise visibility, data, and attention.
> Universities, foundations, and research centres authorise knowledge.
> Media institutions shape the conditions under which publics interpret
> power, judge credibility, and form political claims.
>
> Harvey provides the textual basis for this question through his
> discussions of Google’s monopoly power, FAANG, AI, military research,
> transport and communications technologies, the “Netflix economy”,
> urban inequality, billionaire control over “media and information
> flows”, and the state-finance nexus. Harvey presents these materials
> through a theory of capital as a working totality. My
> communication-centred reading gathers these passages as evidence of
> how media, digital systems, knowledge institutions, and communicative
> infrastructures help organise accumulation, labour control, social
> reproduction, geopolitical competition, and public authority.
>
> The political stakes concern public communication. Harvey’s account of
> centralised media power, platform monopoly, philanthropic influence
> over knowledge production, and billionaire statecraft shows how
> capital shapes access to knowledge, credibility, visibility, and
> political reasoning. Communication therefore names a field of command
> and a field of public formation. The issue includes media content and
> the institutional conditions through which people learn, work,
> consume, organise, and judge public claims.
>
> The 2018 /tripleC/ debate supplies the immediate journal context.
> Harvey’s “Universal Alienation” links alienation to information
> technologies, AI, debt, housing, struggles over realisation, and the
> real subsumption of daily life (Harvey 2018a, 2018b). Hardt and Negri
> locate capitalist extraction in communicative networks, social
> cooperation, real subsumption, and multiplicities within capitalist
> rule (Hardt and Negri 2018a, 2018b). Habermas adds the democratic
> vocabulary that clarifies the consequences for public life: steering
> media, bureaucratic filtering, one-way communication flows, and the
> colonisation of communicative spaces by money and administrative
> power. Read together, these materials position Harvey’s 2026 book as a
> contribution to the critique of communication under capital.
>
>
> 2. Harvey’s Mental Map and the Place of Communication
>
> Harvey’s “mental map” presents capital as a moving totality. In the
> opening pages of /The Story of Capital/, Harvey traces capital through
> money, commodities, production, consumption, distribution, state
> functions, social reproduction, and spatial organisation (Harvey 2026,
> 1-5). That map supplies the structure for a communication-centred
> reading of digital capitalism. Platforms, research infrastructures,
> financial networks, logistics chains, data centres, cables, ports,
> airports, universities, foundations, and media institutions coordinate
> movement across those domains. They connect labour, consumption,
> territory, knowledge, and state power. They move information, organise
> circulation, structure access, and help convert social activity into
> value. The communication-centred reading developed here identifies the
> media, platform, logistics, and data infrastructures through which
> capital now organises content, ideology, representation,
> infrastructure, and institutional command.
>
> Harvey’s discussion of FAANG extends this institutional map. Facebook,
> Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google accumulated a mass of users and
> capital in the high-tech sector at astonishing speed (Harvey 2026,
> 131). Harvey also points to Apple’s capital accumulation and Elon
> Musk’s pandemic wealth increase as signs of “astonishing
> centralization of wealth and power in a few hands” (Harvey 2026, 116).
> These examples anchor the theory in recognisable institutional forms.
> Communication industries appear as vehicles of centralisation, rent
> extraction, knowledge control, and class command.
>
> Harvey’s account of billionaire media control turns platform
> concentration into a question of public authority. Billionaire
> investors consolidate command over media and information flows,
> linking rentier power to state restructuring. Harvey treats
> communication industries as instruments of elite power, public
> authority, and the state’s coercive and administrative capacities.
> Harvey ties oligarchic wealth directly to communication power:
>
> Billionaires like Mnuchin played a prominent role in the first Trump
> administration, and they have been stealthily consolidating their
> control over the media and information flows over the past decades.
> Their prominence in the second Trump presidency and the appointment of
> Elon Musk to remake the US institutional structure is telling.
> Government by and for the billionaires is now the order of the day, to
> be enforced by an increasingly militarized state apparatus (Harvey
> 2026, 291).
>
> The passage places media ownership, information flows, state
> restructuring, and coercive power inside the same political field. My
> communication-centred reading draws out the institutional implication:
> billionaire ownership works through media systems, state appointments,
> administrative restructuring, and militarised authority.
>
> Harvey’s account of technological dynamism strengthens the
> communication thread by naming the technical systems through which
> capital, states, and military competition reorganise power. Harvey
> argues that technological, organisational, and “software” dynamism
> belongs at the heart of any viable theory of capital’s mode of
> production as a “working totality” (Harvey 2026, 65). That claim
> belongs to Harvey’s account of capital’s laws of motion. My
> contribution identifies software, data systems, networks, and
> platforms as contemporary instruments of accumulation, circulation,
> labour control, and state capacity.
>
> Harvey gives this extension a direct textual basis in his discussion
> of military competition and technological development. Harvey writes:
>
> Whereas there would be minor interest in the cotton textile industry,
> there would be a much greater interest in the development of
> aerospace, naval construction engineering, the armaments and munitions
> industry (which is currently the most lucrative industry in the world)
> and, perhaps most significant of all, communications and surveillance
> technologies (Harvey 2026, 63).
>
> Harvey names communications and surveillance technologies inside a
> sequence that also includes aerospace, naval engineering, armaments,
> munitions, military rivalry, and state power. The
> communication-centred reading draws out the implication for critical
> communication theory: communication and surveillance technologies
> belong to the material history of accumulation, logistics, military
> power, and monopoly. Digital infrastructures require analysis as
> systems of command, coordination, and value extraction.
>
> Harvey’s chapter on space and time extends the same issue through
> capitalist spatio-temporal reorganisation. Harvey treats globalisation
> as another round in capital’s production and reconstruction of space
> and time. He describes the tendency toward the “annihilation of space
> through time” and the law of “time-space compression” as basic
> features of capitalist development (Harvey 2026, 146; see also Harvey
> 1989). Harvey also gives transport and communications technologies a
> leading role in that restructuring. His claim concerns capital’s
> effort to shorten turnover times, reorganise spatial relations, and
> accelerate movement across distance.
>
> Internet infrastructures, platform logistics, algorithmic
> coordination, and financial transmission systems intensify that drive
> toward speed, compression, and command. Harvey supplies the account of
> time-space compression and the role of transport and communications
> technologies. My reading carries that account into contemporary
> systems that move data, coordinate logistics, organise labour,
> transmit financial signals, and concentrate control across global
> networks.
>
> Harvey’s chapter on technological dynamism tracks labour displacement
> and the reorganisation of work. Harvey (2026, 60) writes that “the job
> market has been radically reconfigured through automation and
> robotization in manufacturing,” producing “widespread job losses,” and
> that “this radical reconfiguration of job opportunities now threatens
> to be repeated in the case of services.” Harvey links that threat to
> “AI,” which he describes as “a misnomer for what should be called
> ‘machine learning.’” Harvey’s words move the labour question from
> manufacturing into services, health care, education, AI, and machine
> learning. The communication-centred reading locates those changes in
> platforms, data systems, educational technologies, research
> infrastructures, and AI systems that reorganise labour demand,
> technical expertise, public knowledge, and institutional power.
>
> Harvey’s discussion of artificial intelligence adds a second layer to
> the labour question. AI enters his analysis through knowledge
> production, technological rivalry, and the fixed capital of the
> general intellect. Harvey (2026, 220) links AI to “the fixed capital
> of the general intellect” and warns that “the benefits will flow to
> capital and the ruling classes and the costs will be visited on labour
> and everyone else”, Harvey then situates “cognitive capitalism” inside
> a broader account of proprietary knowledge and capital’s newer
> technical fields. Harvey (2026, 220-221) writes that “the legal and
> illegal pursuit of proprietary knowledge has continued to flourish
> within the new fields of capital’s development”.
>
> These formulations identify automation, robotisation, machine
> learning, AI, proprietary knowledge, and technological rivalry as
> elements in capital’s reorganisation of labour and knowledge
> production. The communication-centred contribution specifies the
> institutional terrain: universities, research labs, platforms, data
> firms, AI developers, copyright regimes, patent systems, and funding
> agencies own, classify, circulate, monetise, and restrict technical
> knowledge.
>
> Harvey’s labour examples bring the relation between communication and
> capitalism into the present by shifting the image of capitalist labour
> toward logistics, software, platform firms, and infrastructural work.
> Harvey (2026, 79) asks whether the contemporary image of capitalism
> lies in “the Rana Plaza textile plant, Shenzhen industrialism, the
> Amazon warehouse workers, the Google workers in San Francisco, the
> Microsoft workers in Seattle or the huge labour forces at the world’s
> major airports”. Harvey’s question updates the historical geography of
> labour. The examples move from textile production and industrial
> manufacturing to warehouses, platform firms, software labour,
> airports, logistics, and metropolitan tech clusters. Platform work,
> code, distribution systems, and infrastructural labour now belong to
> the contemporary organisation of capital. Socialist imagination
> therefore requires an accurate account of capital’s current forms,
> alienations, and geographies.
>
> The “Netflix economy” gives the same argument a concrete media
> example. Harvey writes:
>
> The Netflix economy requires serious ancillary investments, both
> upstream in the production of a TV series and downstream in the
> transmission towers and the reception equipment (TV screens and
> household electronics), all of which gets monetized, monopolized and
> capitalized by the streaming organizations (Harvey 2026, 128).
>
> Streaming appears weightless on the screen, yet Harvey returns it to
> production studios, transmission systems, reception equipment,
> household electronics, monetisation, monopoly, and capitalisation.
> Media command rests on infrastructures, labour forces, and urban
> reorganisations that exceed the platform interface.
>
> Harvey’s discussion of place adds another layer of evidentiary
> grounding. His Bronx/Upper East Side example shows how capital’s
> production of place, scale, and social reproduction shapes daily life
> and life chances (Harvey 2026, 140). Digital systems operate through
> those uneven environments. Housing, schools, networks, transport,
> security, and public visibility all shape who can participate,
> communicate, learn, work, and move. Harvey supplies the spatial
> account; my communication-centred reading identifies the digital
> infrastructures that organise access, visibility, and participation.
>
>
> 3. Universal Alienation and the Digital Organisation of Daily Life
>
> Harvey defines alienation historically and materially through
> capital’s creation of the world market, the spread of class and
> metabolic relations, and the imposition of value’s laws of motion on
> social life:
>
> In the Grundrisse, the universality of alienation arises out of the
> historical tendency within capital to create the world market, to
> establish its social (class) and metabolic relations everywhere and to
> inscribe certain identifiable laws of motion into human history under
> the rule of the coercive laws of competition. The “universality” is
> specific to capitalism’s historical evolution. The capital which
> labour creates returns to dominate them in both direct and indirect
> ways as the laws of value and of capital in motion (Harvey 2018a, 426).
>
> Harvey’s definition gives alienation a wider social field. His
> concluding formulation on the same page states the point plainly:
> “Alienation is not confined to labour” (Harvey 2018a, 426). Alienation
> enters consumption, urban life, politics, debt, and the social
> reproduction of existence because capital’s laws of motion organise
> the conditions through which people work, move, communicate, borrow,
> consume, and imagine political possibility.
>
> Harvey’s historical materialism keeps human capacities, suffering, and
> political possibility inside the material relations that organise
> daily life. Alienation carries force here because capital’s
> abstractions enter the texture of life: city rhythms, debt
> obligations, housing pressures, work routines, and collective hopes.
>
> Digital capitalism intensifies universal alienation. Harvey’s 2018
> abstract states that alienation dominates much of politics and daily
> life and intensifies through “information technologies and artificial
> intelligence” (Harvey 2018a, 424). That claim turns digital command
> into lived pressure. Social media monopolies, surveillance systems,
> algorithmic management, debt-driven education, and AI-enabled labour
> displacement alter how people work, consume, imagine, and endure. The
> “illusion of decentralization” formulation in /The Story of Capital/
> (Harvey 2026, 111) gains force because Harvey’s earlier essay already
> places alienation inside production and everyday life. The
> technological and experiential forms belong to one movement.
>
> Harvey expands the terrain of struggle without confining communication
> to consumption or circulation. In his essay “Universal Alienation”, he
> argues that many contemporary conflicts occur at the point of
> realisation as well as the point of production (Harvey 2018a,
> 433-434). His examples include housing, transport, rents, urban
> protest, and “broadband services” (Harvey 2018a, 434). Broadband
> access, platform services, data access, subscription systems, and
> mediated visibility enter the sphere of realisation because people
> encounter them as costs, contracts, service conditions, rents, and
> access barriers. Harvey’s later account of Google’s monopoly and the
> “illusion of decentralization” gives this point a digital form (Harvey
> 2026, 111).
>
> The digital realm also belongs to production. Hardt and Negri locate
> contemporary production in cognitive labour, social cooperation,
> communicative networks, digital connections, codes, languages,
> affects, and images (Hardt and Negri 2018a, 416-417). Their account
> keeps digital capitalism inside the analysis of labour, extraction,
> cooperation, and productive capacity. Platforms organise labour,
> command code and data, extract value from cooperative activity, and
> turn communicative capacities into productive forces. Harvey explains
> why communication conflicts appear across rents, broadband services,
> debt obligations, education markets, and urban infrastructures. Hardt
> and Negri clarify why those conflicts also involve production: digital
> systems place users, workers, students, tenants, consumers, and
> households inside circuits of value creation, extraction, and control.
>
> Harvey’s emphasis on daily life opens a bridge to Henri Lefebvre’s
> account of socially produced space. Harvey’s 2018 essay repeatedly
> invokes the city, the street, the home, and everyday existence as
> zones of contemporary discontent. He describes urban uprisings and
> anti-austerity protests as movements animated by populations alienated
> by deteriorating conditions of daily life and by the absence of
> meaningful democracy over the organisation of urban existence (Harvey
> 2018a, 429, 434). /The Story of Capital/ carries that emphasis into
> capital’s totality, social reproduction, state policy, the geography
> of accumulation, and the spatial organisation of labour and life.
>
> A communication-centred reading extends this daily-life framework to
> the digital systems that now organise everyday space. Smartphones,
> algorithmic labour platforms, educational software, logistics systems,
> urban data infrastructures, and digital payment systems mediate work,
> movement, debt, education, visibility, and access. Lefebvre gives this
> extension a spatial vocabulary because everyday life takes shape
> through produced environments, routines, rhythms, infrastructures, and
> institutions (Lefebvre 1991). Harvey supplies the account of
> alienation across urban life and social reproduction. Lefebvre
> supplies the account of produced space. The communication argument
> connects those materials to the digital systems that organise daily
> life under contemporary capitalism.
>
> Harvey’s humanist Marxism comes into focus where alienation,
> Lefebvre’s everyday life, housing, debt, urban space, and digital
> mediation meet. /The Story of Capital/ grounds that claim in Harvey’s
> account of space, place, and social reproduction:
>
> This forces recognition of the spatially differentiated qualities of
> personal life and of social reproduction as experienced in the daily
> life of the labourer. These are all embedded in divergent economic,
> social and environmental conditions and processes operating at
> different scales. To be raised in the Bronx is to encounter radically
> different life chances than to be raised in the Upper East Side of
> Manhattan (Harvey 2026, 140).
>
> The Bronx/Upper East Side contrast links capital’s geography to daily
> life, social reproduction, and unequal life chances. Housing,
> commuting, neighbourhood inequality, debt, and urban dislocation
> become concrete pressures within the movement of value. Harvey’s
> return to Lefebvre strengthens this point. Harvey writes that Lefebvre
> “replaced the deep mysticism of Heidegger’s concept of ‘dwelling’ with
> the more prosaic ‘inhabiting’ as foundational for the everyday life
> taking place in the material, conceptual and lived spaces of class
> struggles and endless capital accumulation” (Harvey 2026, 158).
> Digital mediation extends this spatial frame into platform power,
> algorithmic management, networked consumption, educational software,
> rental markets, and uneven access to public visibility. Harvey’s
> political economy keeps lived experience inside the analysis of
> accumulation.
>
> The politics of alienation in Harvey’s 2018 essay clarifies the
> political danger of digital concentration. Harvey links alienation to
> resentment, disempowerment, anger, and authoritarian-populist
> identification. His formulation is blunt: “For alienated,
> disempowered, frustrated and angry people, such arguments would be
> compelling. Trump is the President of alienation” (Harvey 2018a, 429).
> The passage gives the communication argument sharper political stakes.
> /The Story of Capital/ extends the material setting through
> billionaire power, platform concentration, Google’s monopoly, AI, and
> the state-finance nexus.
>
> This reading applies Harvey’s political diagnosis to the
> infrastructures that channel alienation into disorientation,
> resentment, authoritarian identification, and organised struggle.
>
> Harvey’s conclusion to /The Story of Capital/ sharpens the political
> meaning of alienation by linking wage repression, dispossession, AI,
> and collective struggle. After identifying the major contradictions of
> the present as “potential fodder for anticapitalist struggles,” Harvey
> names the social force required to confront them:
>
> It will take a mass movement of the alienated and dispossessed and
> some concrete results of specific struggles to awaken the hope and
> prospect for a better collective future. To make matters worse, AI
> threatens to reduce labour demand substantially, well into the future.
> Wage repression is more likely to increase than to decline in coming
> years without a vigorous campaign against it (Harvey 2026, 343).
>
> Harvey’s claim concerns alienation, dispossession, AI-driven
> reductions in labour demand, wage repression, and organised struggle.
> The digital application follows from that conclusion.Platform
> monopoly, algorithmic management, data extraction, AI systems, and
> billionaire media power reorganise labour demand and shape the
> channels through which alienation gains political form. Harvey names
> the contradiction and the need for collective struggle. The
> communication argument extends that diagnosis to the infrastructures
> that organise work, public knowledge, and political orientation.
>
> Harvey’s wider project also keeps debt at the centre of alienation. In
> /The Story of Capital/, debt appears as a disciplinary relation that
> binds present life to future labour:
>
> Indebtedness becomes an alternative means to discipline whole
> populations to the requirements of capital. Debts are a claim on
> future labour. The more indebted the working population, the more
> bound they are to use their future labour to retire their debts. In
> advanced capitalism, working people and the population in general are
> now so thoroughly mired in mortgage debt, medical debt, student debt,
> auto loans, credit card and consumer debt that they find themselves in
> a virtual state of debt peonage (Harvey 2026, 240).
>
> This passage clarifies why debt belongs inside the analysis of
> alienation and digital capitalism. Educational debt channels students
> into platformised labour markets. Household debt disciplines workers
> into accepting algorithmic management, unstable schedules, and
> data-intensive workplace control. Municipal and state debt
> restructures public services, communication systems, and urban
> infrastructures. Debt shapes the labour, knowledge, education, and
> public life that remain materially possible.
>
>
> 4. Hardt and Negri: Communicative Networks, Real Subsumption, and
> Multiplicity
>
> The 2018 /tripleC/ exchange among Harvey, Hardt, and Negri gives this
> communication-centred reading its immediate journal context. Hardt and
> Negri’s first essay, “/The Powers of the Exploited and the Social
> Ontology of Praxis/” situates contemporary exploitation within social
> cooperation, communicative networks, digitisation, automation, and
> finance. Their second essay, “/The Multiplicities within Capitalist
> Rule and the Articulation of Struggles”/, extends real subsumption
> from labour to society and treats capitalist rule through
> multiplicities across class, race, gender, and other axes of
> subordination. Harvey’s “/Universal Alienation/” and his response to
> Hardt and Negri place those concerns inside a debate about alienation,
> daily life, and political praxis.
>
> The first essay directly addresses communication. Hardt and Negri
> argue that current capitalist development takes shape through
> cognitive and social production in which cooperation intensifies and
> becomes “immersed” in “communicative networks and digital connections”
> that permeate industrial assets, services, agriculture, and the wider
> economic organisation of society (Hardt and Negri 2018a, 416). The
> claim connects the 2018 exchange to Harvey’s 2026 account of platform
> concentration, AI, and knowledge monopolisation. Harvey identifies
> platform concentration, AI, and knowledge monopolisation. Hardt and
> Negri emphasise the social productivity that makes those forms of
> extraction possible. Capital valorises cooperative flows of “muscles,
> languages, affects, codes, and images” within social production (Hardt
> and Negri 2018a, 416). Digital capitalism depends on the expropriation
> of communicative capacities distributed across the social field.
>
> Digitisation and automation sit at the centre of Hardt and Negri’s
> account of contemporary exploitation. Their essay describes a phase in
> which capital develops through the extraction of value from common
> goods and from the expanded cooperation of living labour in social
> networks, codes, languages, and affective relations (Hardt and Negri
> 2018a, 415-417). Their account sharpens the description of Harvey’s
> digital evidence. Platforms organise cooperative social capacities,
> sell communication, and extract value from those capacities.
>
> Their account also shifts the centre of gravity from industrial
> command to the extraction of value from the common. Their essay treats
> cognitive labour, fixed capital, and social cooperation as the ground
> of contemporary praxis (Hardt and Negri 2018a, 415-418). Hardt and
> Negri’s emphasis illuminates Harvey’s 2026 book. Harvey’s discussions
> of Apple, Google, AI, higher education, and research infrastructures
> already point towards the commodification of knowledge and
> communication. Hardt and Negri provide a clearer vocabulary for
> describing that movement. Knowledge, code, language, and affect become
> productive forces. Capital seeks to command those forces and to
> appropriate their yield.
>
> Hardt and Negri’s second essay, which is part of their
> /tripleC/-debate with Harvey, introduces multiplicity as its main
> analytical gain. Hardt and Negri argue that real subsumption now
> describes society under capital as well as labour in the immediate
> production process (Hardt and Negri 2018b, 442). Their analysis treats
> capitalist rule as a field of interacting differences. Class, race,
> gender, and other axes of subordination shape the organisation of
> capitalist society, political subjectivity, and anti-capitalist
> struggle (Hardt and Negri 2018b, 442-444). They develop this point
> through racial capitalism and patriarchal capitalism, where racism and
> patriarchy appear as relatively autonomous structures that capital
> absorbs, transforms, and redeploys within “properly capitalist”
> society (Hardt and Negri 2018b, 443-445). Their concept of
> multiplicity gives feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist
> struggles a shared analytical field.
>
> Harvey gives the relation between multiplicity and capital a different
> emphasis. He accepts the value of extending formal and real
> subsumption to housing and daily life, then adds a caveat: the
> analysis must specify what enters which circuit of capital (Harvey
> 2018b, 450-451). His housing example shows the distinction clearly.
> Housing enters the circulation of interest-bearing capital, debt
> peonage, and the consumption fund, which generates class relations
> that differ from the labour process inside industrial capital (Harvey
> 2018b, 450-451). Harvey gives greater analytical weight to capital’s
> laws of motion, class relations, and the specific circuits through
> which domination acquires material force. Race, gender, patriarchy,
> and social reproduction remain central to capitalist society; Harvey’s
> method asks how those relations operate through accumulation, debt,
> land, rent, labour power, state formation, and financial command.
>
> The communication-centred reading develops from that difference. Hardt
> and Negri supply the vocabulary of multiplicity, social production,
> and articulated struggle. Harvey supplies the stronger account of
> capital’s circuits, class relations, and institutional command. Their
> exchange places communication inside capitalist rule while preserving
> the distinction between exploitation and wider forms of domination.
> Digital platforms, research infrastructures, media monopolies, debt
> systems, and educational institutions organise class power while
> sorting publics through race, gender, migration status, credentialing,
> visibility, and access. Communication appears as a terrain where
> capital’s circuits and social multiplicities meet: platforms extract
> value from cooperative social life, while public struggles contest the
> forms of domination that organise access, recognition, knowledge, and
> voice.
>
> The exchange also creates a more explicit link between social analysis
> and political organisation. Hardt and Negri’s account of real
> subsumption supports a theory of articulated struggles across the
> social terrain. Traditional syndicalist forms of organisation retain
> importance, and the social field of struggle now extends from the
> factory wall into wider social fields. The communication implication
> is concrete. Struggles around data extraction, surveillance, housing,
> care, debt, education, migration, and platform labour all belong to
> the wider terrain of social production and social reproduction.
> Harvey’s emphasis on realisation struggles resonates strongly here.
> Hardt and Negri extend the resonance by clarifying that the social
> terrain itself has become a site of production and extraction.
>
> Hardt and Negri specify praxis under conditions of social production.
> They argue that Ni Una Menos shows how a strike can move through
> factories, student collectives, community collectives, households,
> streets, and other social spaces. Their formulation is precise: “as
> production becomes increasingly social, so too the traditional forms
> of strike must transform into a social strike” (Hardt and Negri 2018b,
> 445). They extend the same logic to anti-racist struggles, including
> Black Lives Matter in the United States and the Fallist student
> movements in South Africa, Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall. In
> their account, racial hierarchy and white supremacy intertwine with
> capitalist rule across policing, prison systems, racialised state
> policy, labour regimes, and expropriation (Hardt and Negri 2018b,
> 445-446).
>
> The communication-centred reading develops the implications of that
> argument. Ni Una Menos, Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall, and Fees
> Must Fall make visible a terrain where labour, race, gender,
> education, social reproduction, public speech, media circulation, and
> institutional authority meet. Platform labour, data extraction, debt,
> migration, racialisation, education, and social reproduction can
> therefore enter the same analysis of digitally mediated accumulation.
> Hardt and Negri supply the framework of social production, social
> strike, multiplicity, and articulated struggle. The
> communication-centred reading extends that framework to digital
> infrastructures, platform systems, and public knowledge institutions
> as part of the terrain on which contemporary praxis takes shape.
>
> The question of praxis enters digital capitalism through the expanded
> terrain on which accumulation now depends. Harvey’s point about
> realisation struggles already shows that conflict concentrates in the
> factory and across the infrastructures of everyday life. Broadband
> access, housing costs, educational debt, rent extraction, subscription
> systems, logistics networks, and platform labour now organise major
> zones of dispossession. Hardt and Negri sharpen this development by
> locating contemporary exploitation in communicative networks, social
> cooperation, and the extraction of value from languages, affects,
> codes, and images. Class struggle, therefore, appears across
> workplaces, households, streets, campuses, media infrastructures, and
> urban systems at once. That wider field broadens the material basis of
> class politics. The struggle over digital capitalism concerns wages,
> labour demand, and the infrastructures and institutions through which
> people communicate, learn, move, and reproduce social life. Harvey’s
> call for a movement of the alienated and dispossessed gains sharper
> strategic meaning in that setting, because communication itself has
> become a site of production, extraction, and collective contestation.
>
> The exchange reaches its closest point in Harvey’s response. Hardt and
> Negri describe “Universal Alienation” as a strong basis for discussion
> because Harvey expands alienation into debt, gentrification, urban
> space, and the world market (Hardt and Negri 2018b, 440-441). Harvey’s
> response confirms the shared direction of the debate and links
> universal alienation to “the progress of real subsumption of not only
> labour processes but many aspects of daily life under the power of
> capital in its various forms” (Harvey 2018b, 452). That sentence
> belongs to Harvey. My interpretation of the exchange extends Harvey’s
> claim to digital capitalism: alienation names the lived and political
> pressure of platform command, debt, surveillance, automation, and
> mediated disempowerment; real subsumption names capital’s widening
> organisation of labour, housing, education, communication
> infrastructures, and daily life. Harvey supplies the account of
> universal alienation and the insistence on specifying what enters
> which circuit of capital. Hardt and Negri supply the vocabulary of
> communicative networks, social cooperation, extraction, and praxis.
> Their exchange gives communication a precise place in the argument: a
> social terrain where accumulation, alienation, subsumption, and
> struggle meet.
>
> The 2018 exchange sharpens the communication thread that runs across
> Harvey’s 2026 book. Harvey gives the large map of capital’s
> circulation, technological dynamism, monopoly, and state power.
> “Universal Alienation” supplies the experiential and political
> pressure of those developments. Hardt and Negri specify communicative
> extraction and praxis by showing how digital networks, social
> cooperation, and multiplicity operate inside capitalist rule. The
> democratic question, then, concerns the injury caused when these
> institutional arrangements reshape public communication.
>
> Harvey’s strategic reflections create a political horizon. Harvey
> imagines the possibility of a “League of Socialist Cities” and locates
> anti-capitalist potentials in urban and regional forms that could curb
> entrepreneurial urbanisation and concentrated private power (Harvey
> 2026, 342). That image gives the argument a concrete political
> horizon. It also resonates strongly with the communication question.
> Cities organise infrastructures, institutions, and public spheres.
> They remain key sites where media systems, logistics networks,
> housing, and everyday life can be brought into a common political frame.
>
>
> 5. Harvey, the State, Public Communication, and Habermas
>
> Harvey’s 2026 book repeatedly places the state inside capital’s moving
> totality. Harvey writes that significant elements of the contemporary
> capitalist state are “independent and autonomous but subsumed within”
> the laws of motion of capital’s mode of production (Harvey 2026, 12).
> Harvey’s formulation has great analytical value. The state appears as
> a material participant in accumulation through tax flows, debt,
> infrastructure, treasury functions, financial policy, territorial
> competition, and crisis management. Harvey’s chapters on the
> state-finance nexus strengthen this point. Harvey describes the
> state-finance nexus as the “central nervous system” that regulates
> capital flow and manages foundational contradictions within the
> capitalist mode of production (Harvey 2026, 317). Harvey also argues
> that the working population often remains sidelined as billionaire
> factions struggle for control over this nexus (Harvey 2026, 291-292).
>
> Harvey’s treatment of the credit system deepens this picture. In his
> account, the circulation of interest-bearing capital “hardens” into a
> coordinating force that gives capital a “central nervous system”
> adequate to the management of value flows (Harvey 2026, 232). Harvey
> then notes how planning for the economy increasingly shifts from the
> state into the offices of financial institutions closely connected to
> the Treasury and adjacent agencies (Harvey 2026, 233). This
> formulation gives the argument a sharper institutional anchor. Media
> empires, digital monopolies, and platform infrastructures operate
> inside a wider financial and administrative order that channels
> capital, information, and public authority through the same circuits,
> a pattern that also resonates with Harvey’s broader analysis of
> abstraction and economic irrationality (Harvey 2017).
>
> The phrase “central nervous system” also helps clarify the relation
> between finance and communication. Nervous systems transmit signals,
> coordinate responses, and regulate movement across the body. Harvey’s
> metaphor, therefore, has analytical force for critical communication
> theory. It points to a finance-communication complex in which
> information processing, credit allocation, risk management, and public
> authority work together to govern circulation and accumulation.
> Treating digital media within that wider regime of coordination gives
> the analysis greater precision.
>
> The credit system metaphor clarifies why billionaire control over
> media and information flows carries political significance. Harvey
> presents oligarchic media ownership as part of a broader
> reorganisation of class power in which fictitious capital,
> Treasury-linked finance, philanthropic influence, and platform
> monopoly shape the conditions of public knowledge. His discussion of
> centralised media control and Google gives the point a direct textual
> basis:
>
> Increasingly centralized control over the media likewise limits public
> access to critical forms of knowledge production, even as social media
> and internet technologies create the illusion of decentralization of
> individual expression. This is one of the most beautiful examples of
> the rule that the best way to assure increasingly centralized power is
> through dispersal and decentralization. Individualistic and dispersed
> peer-to-peer computing activities, for example, contributed mightily
> to Google’s current monopoly power (Harvey 2026, 111).
>
> Habermas helps name the communicative consequence. Once money and
> administrative power reshape the institutional channels through which
> publics receive, contest, and circulate information, public
> communication loses density, reciprocity, and independence. Harvey’s
> account of digital concentration therefore describes an institutional
> transformation of the public sphere and an industrial transformation
> of media markets.
>
> Harvey’s earlier discussion of Habermas gives this Habermasian turn a
> direct textual precedent. In /The Condition of Postmodernity/, Harvey
> identifies Habermas as a theorist who defends the Enlightenment
> project through language, consensual action, and communicative reason:
>
> “It is precisely this kind of relativism and defeatism that Habermas
> seeks to combat in his defence of the Enlightenment project. […] He,
> too, turns to the question of language, and in /The Theory of
> Communicative Action/ insists upon the dialogical qualities of human
> communication in which speaker and hearer are necessarily oriented to
> the task of reciprocal understanding. Out of this, Habermas argues,
> consensual and normative statements do arise, thus grounding the role
> of universalizing reason in daily life. It is this that allows
> ‘communicative reason’ to operate ‘in history as an avenging force’”
> (Harvey 1989, 52).
>
> Harvey’s 1989 reading places Habermas at the intersection of language,
> reason, consensual action, reciprocal understanding, and daily life.
> That connection extends to the institutions Harvey analyses in /The
> Story of Capital/: media concentration, platform monopoly, higher
> education, billionaire information control, and the state-finance
> nexus all shape the conditions under which public communication can occur.
>
> The finance-communication frame also keeps higher education in view.
> Harvey’s discussion of centralised media control and Google’s monopoly
> (Harvey 2026, 111) sits alongside an account of elite universities,
> corporate philanthropy, and private influence over research agendas.
> That linkage strengthens a communication-centred reading. The problem
> concerns media ownership and the institutions that authorise
> knowledge, shape innovation, and determine which forms of expertise
> gain public credibility. Harvey therefore opens a route to analysing
> digital capitalism through the political economy of universities,
> foundations, and research infrastructures.
>
> Habermas specifies the democratic consequences of Harvey’s evidence.
> Fuchs (2026) situates Habermas’s concepts of communication, the public
> sphere, and the colonisation of the lifeworld within critical media
> and communication studies, including the analysis of algorithmic
> control and fragmented digital publics. Harvey’s treatment of the
> state, media concentration, and public institutions gives that
> framework a concrete material field.
>
> Habermas’s steering-media framework identifies the communicative
> consequences of Harvey’s institutional architecture. Habermas argues
> that money and power function as “steering media” that can replace
> language as mechanisms of coordination in specific domains of action
> (Habermas 1987, 322, 390). Habermas acknowledges the efficiency gains
> that this replacement can produce in material reproduction. Habermas
> insists that cultural reproduction, social integration, and
> socialisation depend on communicative action and mutual understanding.
> Steering media can generate pathologies when they invade spheres that
> require communicative coordination (Habermas 1987, 322, 390). The
> framework illuminates Harvey’s book because media, higher education,
> research institutions, and the political public sphere sit at the
> boundary where economic and administrative imperatives reshape
> symbolic reproduction.
>
> Habermas’s treatment of mass communication directly illuminates
> Harvey’s discussion of digital monopoly. Habermas argues that mass
> media “technically amplify linguistic communication”, bridge spatial
> and temporal distances, and intensify the network of communicative
> action. He also warns that organisational forms can neutralise this
> expanded communicative potential by establishing “one-way” and
> “nonreversible” communication flows (Habermas 1984, 372). Harvey shows
> how dispersed peer-to-peer activity can help consolidate Google’s
> monopoly and how social media can sustain the “illusion of
> decentralization” amid centralised command (Harvey 2026, 111).
> Habermas helps explain why that concentration carries economic,
> communicative, and democratic consequences. Organisational forms shape
> communication by channelling, filtering, and monetising interaction.
>
> Habermas also provides a vocabulary for the deformation of public
> communication. In /The Theory of Communicative Action/, Habermas
> argues that political systems produce mass loyalty through welfare
> promises and through the selective exclusion of themes and
> contributions from public discussion. Habermas names “bureaucratic
> deformation of the structures of public communication” and
> “manipulative control of the flow of communication” as mechanisms that
> can uncouple elite self-presentation from real decision-making
> (Habermas 1987, 346-347). Harvey’s 2026 book reaches a closely related
> diagnosis through political economy. Harvey tracks billionaire
> concentration, rentier command, philanthropic influence over knowledge
> production, and the sidelining of popular forces inside the
> state-finance nexus. Habermas’s account shows how those processes
> reshape communication, legitimacy, and participation. Harvey
> identifies the political economy of concentrated power. Habermas’s
> theory of communicative action identifies the communicative damage
> that follows.
>
> The Habermasian angle sharpens the democratic meaning of alienation by
> connecting Harvey’s political economy to reification in communicative
> life. In /The Theory of Communicative Action/, Habermas returns to
> Lukács in the chapter “From Lukács to Adorno: Rationalization as
> Reification” and relocates reification inside everyday communication.
> Habermas argues that reification reaches “the lifeworld itself” when
> social relations appear through objectified forms of exchange,
> administration, and thing-like calculation (Lukács 1971; Habermas
> 1984, 356). He then links this process to “the de-linguistified medium
> of exchange value” (Habermas 1984, 359-360). The formulation gives the
> argument a precise mechanism. Money-mediated coordination and
> administrative management can displace forms of social integration
> that require language, reciprocity, and mutual understanding.
>
> Habermas develops the same problem in /Lifeworld and System/ through
> the colonisation thesis. Economic and administrative rationalities
> enter areas of action that depend on cultural transmission, social
> integration, and communicative understanding (Habermas 1987, 330-331).
> Harvey’s universal alienation gives that communicative injury a
> material setting. In “Universal Alienation,” Harvey writes that
> “alienation exists almost everywhere” and identifies alienation in
> production, consumption, politics, and daily life (Harvey 2018a, 429).
> He also argues that debt-driven conditions turn democracy into a sham
> and that the state-finance nexus binds future life to the redemption
> of debts (Harvey 2018a, 436-437). Universal alienation therefore
> reaches communication because communication belongs to daily life.
> Media concentration, platform monopoly, higher education, billionaire
> information control, and administrative filtering all shape how
> publics form judgement, contest authority, and circulate knowledge.
>
> This Habermasian line remains anchored in Harvey’s account of capital.
> Harvey maps the material organisation of media power. Habermas
> identifies the communicative injury that develops when money,
> administration, and one-way media flows govern institutions that
> require public reasoning. The result is a reification of
> communication: public speech, civic attention, expertise, and
> participation appear as manageable objects inside media markets,
> bureaucratic procedures, platform architectures, and systems of debt.
> Harvey supplies the political economy of universal alienation.
> Habermas explains how alienation enters the communicative structure of
> public life.
>
>
> 6. Assessment: The Contribution and the Open Questions
>
> /The Story of Capital/makes a major contribution to Marxist theory and
> critical communication studies. Harvey offers a synthetic, lucid, and
> expansive account of capital’s totality. The book’s strengths are
> evident from its conceptual architecture. Harvey integrates
> production, circulation, realisation, technology, finance, fixed
> capital, social reproduction, extractivism, the rentier, and the
> state-finance nexus within one moving field. Apple, Google, Amazon,
> Musk, Silicon Valley, AI, Blackstone, central banks, higher education,
> and military research all appear inside the same theoretical horizon.
> That concreteness greatly enhances the book’s usefulness for
> communication scholars.
>
> The book’s second major strength lies in its treatment of the state.
> Harvey integrates the economy and the state within a single moving
> field. Harvey shows how state functions inhabit the inner structure of
> accumulation and how financial governance, public debt,
> infrastructural investment, military competition, and territorial
> control enter capital’s very operation. This framework is especially
> valuable for media and digital analysis because communication
> infrastructures often sit at the intersection of state policy,
> military investment, research funding, and corporate platform expansion.
>
> The third major strength lies in Harvey’s historical sensibility.
> Harvey consistently treats capital as geographically uneven,
> historically specific, and internally contradictory. This sensibility
> allows the book to move from Manchester to Shenzhen, from Venice to
> Silicon Valley, from the factory to the airport, from the university
> to the central bank. The communication analysis gains force because it
> appears inside this broader historical map.
>
> The book also invites further work in several areas. Harvey briefly
> names “cognitive capitalism” and leaves room for further analysis of
> the specific mechanisms by which platforms extract value from data,
> attention, user activity, and infrastructural dependence (Harvey 2026,
> 221). Harvey identifies the centralisation of platform power and the
> fusion of state, finance, and oligarchy. The book also leaves room for
> a fuller account of algorithmic governance, data capture, cloud
> infrastructure, and communication labour. Hardt and Negri help specify
> communicative networks, the common, and social cooperation. Habermas
> clarifies the public sphere consequences of media concentration and
> administrative steering. These open questions indicate where a
> communication-centred reading can extend Harvey’s project.
>
> A further open question concerns the spatial vocabulary of
> communication. Time-space compression deserves sustained attention
> within the communication vocabulary, and Harvey’s chapter on space and
> time establishes the importance of that emphasis (Harvey 1989, 2026).
> Digital communication reduces distance, accelerates coordination,
> reorders scale, and recentres power through infrastructure, finance,
> and platform ownership. A communication-centred account can treat
> those developments as part of the political economy of communication.
>
> Another open question concerns political form. Harvey’s framework
> points toward anti-capitalist transformation and the need for
> institutional reorganisation, while the exact forms of communicative
> and political organisation require further specification. Harvey’s
> emphasis on realisation struggles, the state-finance nexus, and the
> billionaire capture of media and politics suggests that labour
> organisation, urban politics, digital infrastructure struggles, media
> democracy, and public knowledge institutions all carry strategic
> importance. Hardt and Negri’s language of articulation and
> multiplicity becomes particularly useful here, as does Habermas’s
> emphasis on discursive will-formation and the protection of
> communicative infrastructures from monetary and administrative domination.
>
> A final strength deserves emphasis. Harvey’s book speaks across
> disciplines and sustains analytical rigour. Political economy,
> geography, media and communication studies, sociology, urban theory,
> and critical theory can all enter the argument. That breadth gives the
> book unusual value for communication scholars. The book creates a
> shared vocabulary for analysing how capital organises technological
> change, communication systems, and public life.
>
> Harvey’s strongest institutional line runs through the state-finance
> nexus, higher education, philanthropic power, monopoly platforms,
> urban infrastructures, and the struggle over public knowledge. That
> focus shows why Harvey’s map of capital helps explain the shrinking
> conditions of public reasoning in the digital age.
>
>
> 7. Conclusion
>
> David Harvey’s /The Story of Capital/ reconstructs capital as a
> “working totality” and gives communication a material place inside
> that reconstruction. Technological dynamism, platform concentration,
> communications and surveillance technologies, higher education, AI,
> billionaire control over “media and information flows”, and the
> state-finance nexus appear as institutions and infrastructures through
> which capital organises circulation, knowledge, visibility, and public
> authority (Harvey 2026, 63, 111, 290-292).
>
> The communication thread depends on how Harvey treats public
> institutions. Universities, treasuries, philanthropic foundations,
> municipal infrastructure, monopoly platforms, logistics networks, and
> urban systems organise the movement of knowledge, capital, labour, and
> everyday life. Harvey’s spatial account of “time-space compression”
> and the “annihilation of space through time” shows how digital
> communication participates in the reorganisation of territory,
> infrastructure, scale, and symbolic exchange (Harvey 2026, 149).
>
> The 2018 tripleC debate supplies the key frame for relating Harvey’s
> earlier essay to the new book. Universal alienation names the lived
> pressure of capital across production, consumption, politics, debt,
> and daily life. Hardt and Negri give that pressure a communication
> vocabulary by locating exploitation in communicative networks,
> cognitive and social production, real subsumption, and the extraction
> of value from the common. Harvey’s reply connects universal alienation
> to the real subsumption of daily life, which returns the debate to the
> institutional and digital evidence assembled in /The Story of Capital/.
>
> Habermas clarifies the democratic consequence of that evidence.
> Steering media, bureaucratic filtering, and one-way communication
> flows identify how money, administration, and concentrated media power
> can damage institutions that depend on public reasoning. Harvey
> supplies the political economy of concentrated command; Habermas names
> the communicative injury within the public sphere.
>
> The political horizon emerges from this combined reading. Harvey calls
> present contradictions “potential fodder for anticapitalist struggles”
> and calls for “a mass movement of the alienated and dispossessed”
> (Harvey 2026, 343). In the digital age, that struggle concerns wages,
> labour demand, urban life, and the infrastructures through which
> people communicate, learn, move, and form public judgement.
>
> Harvey’s story of capital is also a story of media command, digital
> concentration, and the contested future of public communication.
> Capital now organises communication as infrastructure, labour process,
> knowledge regime, class command, and political terrain. Public
> communication depends on infrastructures, universities, treasuries,
> platforms, and urban systems shaped by capital’s circulation.
>
>
> References
>
> Fuchs, Christian. 2020. /Communication and Capitalism: A Critical
> Theory/. London: University of Westminster Press. DOI:
> https://doi.org/10.16997/book45
>
> Fuchs, Christian. 2026. Reason and Communication: Jürgen Habermas’s
> Legacy for Media and Communication Studies. /tripleC: Communication,
> Capitalism & Critique /24 (1): 54-72. DOI:
> https://doi.org/10.31269/7112an90
>
> Habermas, Jürgen. 1984. /The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1:
> Reason and the Rationalization of Society/. Translated by Thomas
> McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
>
> Habermas, Jürgen. 1987. /The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2:
> Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason/. Translated
> by Thomas McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
>
> Hardt, Michael, and Toni Negri. 2018a. The Powers of the Exploited and
> the Social Ontology of Praxis. /tripleC: Communication, Capitalism &
> Critique/ 16 (2): 415-423. DOI:
> https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v16i2.1024
>
> Hardt, Michael, and Toni Negri. 2018b. The Multiplicities within
> Capitalist Rule and the Articulation of Struggles. /tripleC:
> Communication, Capitalism & Critique/ 16 (2): 440-448. DOI:
> https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v16i2.1025
>
> Harvey, David. 1989. /The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into
> the Origins of Cultural Change/. Oxford: Blackwell.
>
> Harvey, David. 2017. /Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic
> Reason/. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
>
> Harvey, David. 2018a. Universal Alienation. tripleC: Communication,
> Capitalism & Critique 16 (2): 424-439. DOI:
> https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v16i2.1026
>
> Harvey, David. 2018b. Universal Alienation and the Real Subsumption of
> Daily Life under Capital: A Response to Hardt and Negri. tripleC:
> Communication, Capitalism & Critique 16 (2): 449-453. DOI:
> https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v16i2.1027
>
> Harvey, David. 2026. /The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know
> About How Capital Works/. London: Verso.
>
> Knoche, Manfred. 2025. /Critique of the Political Economy of the
> Media: Foundations and Applications/. London: University of
> Westminster Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book79
>
> Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. /The Production of Space/. Translated by Donald
> Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.
>
> Lukács, Georg. 1971. /History and Class Consciousness: Studies in
> Marxist Dialectics/. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA:
> MIT Press.
>
> *About the Author*
>
> /John W. Bessai/, PhD, is an independent scholar-educator and media
> practitioner based in Toronto, Canada. His research examines public
> institutions, cultural infrastructures, labour regimes, democratic
> life, media systems, and public storytelling. He completed his PhD in
> Canadian Studies at Trent University in 2024; his dissertation is
> titled /Art as a Public Service: The National Film Board of Canada’s
> Role in Shaping Democratic Dialogues and Societal Transformation/. His
> published scholarship appeared in /British Journal of Canadian
> Studies/, /Literature, Critique, and Empire Today/, /Culture and
> Dialogue/, /Hungarian Historical Review/, and /PORTAL Journal of
> Multidisciplinary International Studies/. His media practice includes
> documentary, television, and interactive projects such as /Green
> Heroes/, /From Field to Studio: The Art of Paul Kane/, /Arbor Alma/,
> /Museum Maestros/, and /C.W. Jefferys: Picturing Canada/.
> ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0003-2755-6623
>
> ***
>
> /California Review of Books/
>
> https://calirb.com/the-story-of-capital-what-everyone-should-know-about-how-capital-works-by-david-harvey/
>
> * Tuesday, June 2, 2026
>
>
> The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital
> Works by David Harvey
>
>
> Verso
>
>
> Review by Brian Tanguay
>
> David Harvey has been writing about, interpreting and teaching Karl
> Marx for decades. /In The Story of Capital /he ambitiously attempts to
> explain Marx’s key ideas for general readers. This is by no means an
> easy task, not only because some of Marx’s ideas are complex, but also
> because Marxism is something of a fixed notion, especially in the
> United States, either vilified, employed as an epithet or dismissed
> out of hand as irrelevant to contemporary times. Rarely is the
> intellectual framework of Marxism given a fair hearing in mainstream
> discussions. In the United States the belief that capitalism is the
> only way to organize the economy and society is practically immune
> from challenge. Capitalism is equated with freedom and democracy,
> Marxism with totalitarianism and central state control.
>
> There’s plenty of theory here and truthfully some of it makes for
> ponderous reading, but overall Harvey is an excellent guide who excels
> when he shows how theory plays out in society. Most people don’t spend
> much time thinking about macroeconomic theories as they live their
> workaday lives until there comes a shock to the system, like the
> mortgage meltdown of 2008 or the Covid pandemic in 2020. It’s in times
> of crisis that the underlying architecture becomes more visible.
> Surprisingly, it has taken decades for Americans to fully grasp just
> how unequal our society has become, but even with more widespread
> recognition that something is wildly out of whack, agreeing on the
> root causes seems to produce polarization and alienation rather than
> solidarity and demands for change. The public isn’t encouraged to
> blame monopolies or billionaires, rather it’s illegal immigrants,
> diversity initiatives and woke universities who are targets of public
> ire.
>
> What is capital, anyway? Is money capital? Yes, but only when it
> circulates in a particular way. Money becomes capital in its
> interaction with labor and materials, equipment and machinery, and in
> the distribution of wages and profits. Banks facilitate the process by
> making loans. The state plays a role through the assessment and
> collection of taxes and regulation. As Harvey explains, the process of
> circulation is distinct and at least in theory it repeats. But capital
> is plagued by contradictions and doesn’t always follow the script or
> behave rationally. “The sight of unemployed capital and unemployed
> workers,” Harvey writes, “side by side in the midst of obvious chronic
> social needs makes no sense. It is stark testimony to the fundamental
> irrationality of capital.” A key idea is that Marx correctly
> identified capital’s laws of motion in the nineteenth century, and how
> its dynamism is susceptible to myriad interdependent forces.
>
> Defenders of capitalism often claim that rough-and-tumble free
> competition keeps the system honest, separates viable enterprises from
> failed ones, but in practice capitalists prefer, and use their
> resources and influence to secure, the “quiet privilege of rentierism”
> rather than engaging in production. Marx presciently theorized that
> under-regulated capital would result in the sort of monopoly control
> and heightened concentrations of wealth seen today. Harvey points out
> that “Since 1980, political power has sought the neoliberal holy grail
> of lower taxes for the rich while limiting its liabilities to provide
> for the population at large.” Avoiding taxes has spurred the creation
> of a wealth protection industry; the global super wealthy have
> battalions of tax attorneys, accountants and offshore tax havens to
> shield their wealth from tax authorities.
>
> Uneven geographical development, technology and capital mobility have
> produced vast pools of disposable surplus labor around the world. The
> deployment of AI and climate change threaten to fuel this problem and
> unleash greater numbers of people searching for a sustainable life.
> Left to itself, Harvey argues, capital will inevitably destroy the
> primary sources of its own wealth: people and the environment. This
> phenomenon is playing out in real time, and thus far the ruling
> political and economic castes have responded by taking a rightward
> turn, erecting barriers to migration while taking few concrete actions
> to mitigate climate catastrophe. Voluntary, rather than binding,
> efforts remain the order of the day as is seen at every meeting of the
> Conference of the Parties (COP). Year after year, the climate can gets
> booted down the road.
>
> That there’s not much in the way of encouragement in /The Story of
> Capital/ isn’t surprising. I wouldn’t expect a Marxist scholar to
> offer suggestions to remediate capital’s contradictions or blunt its
> serrated edges. We may be far beyond such bandaids. Harvey identifies
> three primary conditions that threaten the future of endless capital
> accumulation. The first is the malaise and alienation at the bottom of
> the wealth pyramid and the social ills this produces. Donald Trump
> gained political power by exploiting economic and social grievances.
> The second is the staggering concentration of wealth and political
> power in what is now recognized as the Billionaire Class. This class
> of plutocrats controls more wealth than some nations, and it keeps the
> value of assets in which it’s heavily invested high. If the adage that
> what goes up must come down is true, will we at some point face the
> prospect of asset deflation and financial collapse? And then what? The
> third condition is climate change with its threats of fires, floods,
> droughts, pestilence and pandemics that drive economic precarity and
> mass migrations.
>
> Some signs suggest that American economic hegemony is beginning to
> crack. The global order that has allowed America to dominate for
> eighty years is fraying, alliances are shifting and the dollar may not
> be the first-choice reserve currency for long. The decline of the key
> capitalist economy in the world presents uncertainties and perils, but
> it also creates opportunities for restructuring on a more humane and
> sustainable basis. What Marx offers, and why his work remains
> relevant, is a framework for critique and analysis. Harvey believes
> that we desperately need an optimism of the intellect to jump start an
> optimism of our will. How else is social change brought about?
>
> It’s also hopeful to remember that capitalism was created by human
> actors, not bestowed on us by gods.
>
>
> On 2026/04/20 07:59, Patrick Bond wrote:
>>
>> (Transcription from YouTube isn't 100% accurate.)
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS-MOVuJAFY
>>
>> *#HarveyEnFilos <https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/harveyenfilos> *
>>
>> *Conferencia magistral de David Harvey *
>>
>> Facultad de Filosofía y Letras UNAM
>> <https://www.youtube.com/@filos_unam>
>>
>> Well, I want to thank you very much for this invitation. It’s always
>> a great pleasure to come to Mexico. I think this is a a lovely
>> country and things are getting so bad in the United States that
>> several of us are thinking of going elsewhere. And actually Mexico
>> looks like a great place to go.
>>
>> But but then you get into the trouble that you’re actually going to
>> be a force of gentrification, which is not good. You still owe
>> allegiance to the premier power of imperialist aggression. And I
>> don’t know if I were you in Mexico, I’d say, you know, tell us to get
>> back there and straighten everything out in the United States. But my
>> work has largely been of course about the nature of capital. And I
>> want to begin with a quotation from my favorite author which is Karl
>> Marx.
>>
>> And it’s a quotation that comes from the first volume of capital.
>>
>> And Marx ventures the opinion that classical political economy he’s
>> referring to Adam Smith, Ricardo and so on, has come close to
>> stumbling into the true state of affairs. But it is it has not
>> consciously formulated what it has found and won’t as long as it
>> remains in its bourgeois.
>>
>> So what Marx is going to be dedicated to is relieving political
>> economy from all of its bourgeois presuppositions. And this of course
>> is something which I value very much and which I’ve sought to do in
>> producing things like the companions to Marx’s capital. But it but
>> what Marx does suggest is that bourgeois economists confront the same
>> material realities as the Marxist but they interpret and explain it
>> very differently.
>>
>> For example, both Marx and regard Ricardo regarded capital as a
>> temporary form of economic organization that could not possibly last
>> very long. And they took the view that while this temporary period of
>> capital domination would be very productive, it would in fact destroy
>> the basis of its own productivity in the long run.
>>
>> But Marx’s view of how this happened and Ricardo’s view are very
>> different.
>>
>> Ricardo thought the problem was this, that more and more people
>> demanding more and more food was going to put a good deal of strain
>> upon natural resources and there will be scarcities and at the same
>> time the value of land was going to rise because of scarcity and the
>> result was that the high rate of rent and the high rate of wages
>> there’s going to be stuck such as to actually lead capital not to
>> have any room for profit. So that’s Ricardo’s profit falling theory
>> and when the profit rate went to zero the incentive for capital to
>> exist would disappear. Marx took a different view.
>>
>> In his view, the rate of profit would fall because individual
>> capitalists driven by the coercive laws of competition were pushed
>> into very fast and very quick technological change.
>>
>> And this technological change would raise the productivity of labor,
>> and labor would ultimately arrive in a situation in which it became
>> almost impossible to utilize it because all of the productivity was
>> now contained in machines. Now this is an interesting kind of
>> question particularly that we are facing right now because artificial
>> intelligence threatens to produce exactly that result that labor
>> becomes almost useless and therefore the wage rate has no
>> relationship to anything anymore. The profit rate would fall to zero.
>>
>> And so Marx’s rate of profit argument is doing exactly the same thing
>> as Ricardo’s except that in Marx’s case it’s not external constraints
>> scarcity of n in nature. It’s an internal contradiction and it’s an
>> internal contradiction in which individual capitalists working in to
>> maximize their own productivity produce an aggregate result which is
>> unfavorable to the furtherance of capital accumulation. If that is
>> the case then this poses an extremely interesting question. Because
>> what Marx is saying in a sense is it’s the capitalists who destroy
>> capital. It’s not the shortage of land or anything of that kind. It’s
>> not other things. It’s the capitalists who do it.
>>
>> And therefore this raises the question of that capitalists have to
>> res try to resolve which is how can the profit rate be revived by a
>> set of policies which are going to revive the conditions for capital
>> accumulation. And that then poses the question who is going to save
>> capitalism from capital and that is the big problem we face right
>> now. How and actually from Adam Smith onwards from the 17th 18th
>> century onwards capital was always getting into difficulties and
>> everybody would had a theory of capital which showed that capital
>> could actually exist without any difficulties. When the new
>> difficulties came, all kinds of people came into this picture and
>> started to try to understand better how the system worked. They
>> didn’t succeed. And as Mark’s notes, they they came often came very
>> close to understanding what the problem was, but they were so tied up
>> in the bourgeois skin as he calls it that they could never really
>> figure out what they needed to do in the given situation.
>>
>> Now in my own work I’m looking at the mass of literature and the mass
>> of institutions which are really set there to try to answer that
>> question of how to preserve capital from the capitalists and
>> occasionally some people see that that is the nature of the problem.
>> For instance, Roosevelt in the 1930s at one point said, “My problem
>> here is not that there’s, you know, too little resources or anything
>> of that kind. My problem here is that the capitalists are just
>> destroying everything. So I have to save capital from from the
>> capitalists.” The other person who did it was Keynes and a lot of
>> Keynesian economics. It’s built around trying to save capital from
>> from the capitalists. But it didn’t work because Kanes was thoroughly
>> bour figure hung back from the real implications of what that find
>> mind finding might look like when it was translated into Marxist
>> terms. So what we have is a huge intellectual industry trying to
>> answer that question.
>>
>> And you say the whole of the field of economics, all of the
>> universities, all of the think tanks, all of the bankers and the
>> financeers and so on, everybody is looking around saying how do we
>> actually stabilize this system? and if you look back and say you know
>> is it a stable system and you say from 1980 onwards the capitalist
>> system has gone through crisis after crisis after crisis and it is in
>> one more crisis one more time right now. So, uh, they certainly
>> haven’t done with all of that firepower and all that intellectual
>> energy. What they’ve never done is to actually explain to us why the
>> system gets into the way it does and how.
>>
>> So, let me digress just a little bit and talk about how Marx starts
>> to unravel this this question. to begin with what he does is to start
>> to say I need to actually come up with an understanding of what is
>> capital and how are we going to actually define what it’s about. Here
>> is what he says.
>>
>> The exact the exact development of the concept of capital is
>> necessary since it is the fundamental concept of modern economics
>> just as capital itself is the foundation of bourgeois society. The
>> sharp formulation of the presuppositions of the capital relation must
>> bring out all the contradictions of bourgeois production as well as
>> the boundary where it drives beyond itself.
>>
>> That is Marx inviting us to consider what is the nature of capital
>> and how are we going to best utilize it. Now notice in this
>> definition of his mission that Marx actually in talking about
>> bringing about all of the contradictions of bourgeois production
>> introduces the notion of contradiction into the argument and in fact
>> what is interesting when you read the bourgeois economics you’ll
>> never see the word contradiction but when I Look at what Marx is doing.
>>
>> The first analytical concept that he develops is that of contradiction.
>>
>> And contradiction is not something that is arbitrary. It is something
>> that is built into the whole structure of capitalist dynamics and I
>> will come back to that shortly. But failure to understand the
>> contradictions of capital seems to me at the root of the reason why
>> all of those institutions and all of those intellectuals and all of
>> those thinkers and so on have never been able to understand exactly
>> why capital does what it does. Whereas Marx is posing an answer to
>> that question and at the same time using the idea of contradiction.
>>
>> Now this kind of problem was highlighted for me in 2008.
>>
>> There was a financial crisis. Everybody called it a financial crisis.
>> It actually it was a a crisis of housing finance. And it’s
>> interesting. The first thing the Baja does is to say, well, you know,
>> housing is just housing. We all know about that. It was the finance
>> that was wrong. Well, no, it was housing that was wrong. So, you’re
>> looking at the wrong thing when you start to analyze the crisis of
>> 2008 as a financial crisis. But even as a financial crisis, there was
>> a failure to understand the where its demands were coming from. And
>> there was a mo wonderful moment in 2008 in the middle of this crisis
>> when her majesty Queen Elizabeth, Queen of England, went to open a
>> new part of the London School of Economics and was the guest of the
>> economics program in London School of Economics.
>>
>> And Her Majesty apparently turned to them at some point and said,
>> “Well, you’re a world economist. How come you didn’t see this crisis
>> coming?” They had no answer and you know I thanked very much her
>> majesty for producing this question and one of the things that then
>> happened was that the economists looked around and find they had no
>> serious answer to her question. So they literally took off about 6
>> months holding symposia as to what went wrong and they got to the end
>> of it and they in six months later they wrote a letter to her majesty
>> in which they said basically we didn’t do anything wrong which of
>> course you know is the sort of thing that Trump likes to say but we
>> didn’t do anything wrong, we you know but we did miss out on
>> something which is very significant and what we missed out on was the
>> notion of systemic risk.
>>
>> Now, I’m not quite sure what systemic risk is, but the idea is
>> certainly that there’s something within the system that is generating
>> the crisis, not something outside. And then I sort of ask you, if you
>> were invited to travel on an airplane that had not been checked out
>> for systemic risk, would you get on it? No. I wouldn’t get on the
>> kind of economics that has not actually checked in his systemic risk.
>> And yet here was the answer to her majesty in which systemic risk
>> became crucial. And I’m very much alert in the last book I wrote and
>> which is there is which is to actually find out about systemic risk.
>>
>> What are the systemic risk risks inside of capital? Why does it do
>> the negative things that it does at the same time as it does some
>> very good things? Now Marx is very curious about this. We think about
>> Marx as a fierce critic of capital. But in the Grundrisse he spends
>> two pages listing all of the incredible findings of capital and how
>> the world has changed so dramatically through the new technologies,
>> the new visions of society and so on. So in a sense when you read
>> that you find that Marx is an incredible is incredibly appreciative
>> of capital. He admires it. He thinks that he’s he’s done fantastic
>> things.
>>
>> And then he goes three or four pages later to talk about how
>> everything in capital is toxic. How it’s ghastly, how it’s and this,
>> of course, is the foundational contradiction.
>>
>> It’s represented in our society right now by artificial intelligence.
>> Everybody looks at it and you can list all kinds of positive things
>> coming out of it and you say to yourself, “Yes, yes, this is it. This
>> is it.” And actually, every new wave of in innovation in the history
>> of capital has been greeted by people as the answer to humanity’s
>> problems of dealing with want and need. that and you know the new
>> factories came along and new transport systems came along. So this is
>> this is fantastic.
>>
>> And Marx also said and also our ways of thinking have now to get away
>> from things about religion and so on and we have to have a pure
>> science which is actually telling us what is really going on in the
>> world and our scientific findings are now fantastic and they can I
>> mean he didn’t say you can be put on the moon by it but you can right
>> now but then the toxicity steps in and artificial intelligence
>> immediately begins to look that way. It is two-sided. It has very
>> negative sides and it has very positive possibilities. That is the
>> central contradiction.
>>
>> And the immediate response is to say, oh well, we’ll try and work on
>> it so that artificial intelligence just gives us the good stuff and
>> we eliminate the bad stuff. don’t think you can do that because every
>> form of technological transformation has good possibilities and
>> fantastic possibilities with fantastic consequences but at the same
>> time has all of these negatives and will continue to have its
>> negatives and that’s why why dialectical thinking starts to become
>> very significant and contradiction becomes very significant.
>>
>> And Marx makes this kind of an interesting kind of comment. He kind
>> of said, you know, I’m always, myself and others, yes, we are
>> interested in contradictions. We really, they’re really something
>> foundational for us. But Ricardo couldn’t stand contradictions. As
>> soon as he got a contradiction, he said, he sort of brushes it off
>> pretends it doesn’t exist.
>>
>> And so we live in a world where the real reason why something
>> happens, the real contradictions which are there are never enunciated
>> and are never laid out because somehow or other the answers are that
>> we know contradiction is not a viable concept. Dialectics is not a
>> way a viable way of thinking. So part of what I’ve been concerned
>> with is try to bring dialectics and thinking and the notion of
>> contradiction really back into the center of what the economic
>> argument is about and to try to recognize that the these
>> contradictions produce other contradictions.
>>
>> And this there comes a point where the question of what is capital
>> becomes absolutely critical. Now contemporary economics - and I’m
>> going to sort of generalize - tends to operate with something called
>> a production function in which the value of a commodity which is made
>> it depends upon the value of land of three factors of production land
>> labor and capital. Notice in that formulation of a production
>> function that capital is a thing. It’s an asset which you can use and
>> a capitalist comes along and uses capital to go combining it with
>> labor and land to make something new. So the production function is
>> is critical to contemporary economics. But in that production
>> function you find that capital is a thing.
>>
>> Now it’s a curious thing because the question arises is what is the
>> value of capital of capital? What is the value of that asset? Well,
>> it’s a physical asset and can therefore get a physical measure. But
>> it turns out that it is in part money in part a lot of equipment like
>> machinery and all the rest of it. And if you want to know the value
>> of capital you have to know the value of the machinery that it uses
>> the land that it the the the factories it builds and so on. So this
>> is a very crucial thing for capital to to somehow or other find a way
>> of measuring what is capital and it actually hasn’t really found an
>> answer to that to that question.
>>
>> But the thing is the nature of it. Now for Marx, capital is not a thing.
>>
>> It is a social relation and it’s a particularly a social relation
>> born out of exchange and as a social relation. It is also in in
>> process of of of moving. I don’t know if these pictures have come up.
>>
>> The complicated picture is Marx’s definition of capital. Well, you
>> can see this is very different from a factor of production. It looks
>> a bit complicated, but actually it’s not too complicated. Begin at
>> the bottom of the big diagram.
>>
>> And the big diagram has money. A capitalist starts with capital and
>> its initiation is it is money.
>>
>> Then the capitalist uses that money to buy commodities and two
>> particular kinds of commodities. Labor power as a commodity and means
>> of production as a commodity.
>>
>> At this point what we say is that capital is defined by money when it
>> is in the money form. When that money is being used to buy the
>> commodities, capital now resides in the labor capacity and the means
>> of production which the capitalist then uses to make a new commodity.
>> So at that point capital becomes a production process.
>>
>> Then the production process produces a thing and that thing is again
>> incorporating capital but it is then sold in the market and somebody
>> then uses the thing and buys it. And what that means is that the
>> capitalist gets money out of it so that the money comes back into the
>> hands of the capitalist who puts it back down at the bottom again. So
>> you go round and round and round in that way. And capital is what
>> Marx calls value in motion. That’s completely different from what the
>> bourgeois economist would say.
>>
>> Value in motion and it’s in motion. And the fact is if this system
>> stopped then capital’s dead.
>>
>> The thing that is important is that the system keeps on moving, keeps
>> on moving, keeps on moving.
>>
>> And after a while, Mark says it, you know, it needs it. It’s being
>> used competitively. The coercive laws of competition are forcing
>> individual capitalists to operate in this system.
>>
>> And one of the things that’s going to happen is the speed with which
>> this circulation takes place tends to increase.
>>
>> And if you look at the history of innovation under capital, a lot of
>> it has been about speed up. How we can go faster and faster. You look
>> at the speed of of transactions on the contemporary stock exchanges
>> of the world and they’re microseconds, milliseconds.
>>
>> And again we’ve built infrastructures and most of the major
>> innovations under capitalism have been about speed about speed of
>> contact the automobile the jet engine the internet all those things
>> with communications and so on.
>>
>> So capital is being here defined as a process not a thing and the
>> process takes value in one form and converts it into another and then
>> into another and then into another and then goes back into and do it
>> all over again. But in doing it all over again each time it goes
>> through it’s like the game of Monopoly. you pass to, you know, you
>> pass to the point where you get $200 for passing go. So the profit
>> rate then becomes significant and the profit rate arises out of the
>> use of capital in those different stages and those steps.
>>
>> Now the interesting thing about this is that Marx starts to thought
>> particularly in the Grundrisse starts to talk about this in the form
>> of a totality. Now the concept of totality like contradiction is
>> really important in marks and it’s underutilized because in many ways
>> Marx did not use it in capital did use it a lot in the grundresa.
>>
>> So capital then is moving through these different moments and
>> different things and is is speeding up as it does so and at the same
>> time it is producing a surplus. Now where in this diagram is the
>> surplus produced? It cannot prod be produced in the market because
>> market exchange is equality for equality. You must find a commodity
>> that has the capacity to produce more value than it has and that
>> commodity is labor power.
>>
>> So labor power is the significant thing and you work labor in such a
>> way as to produce a profit. So that circulation process when you sell
>> the product and you get the money back for it is more money than you
>> started with. So this system is speeding up. It’s producing surplus
>> and it’s profit producing and capitalists themselves become agents
>> whose only interest is to produce profit. So they use all of these
>> moments in production. It’s an interesting term moment. What this
>> means is that capital takes on different visages takes on different
>> forms at different moments. And this then gives the idea they’re
>> moments. This whole process is made up of moments. And it’s therefore
>> something that can be called a totality.
>>
>> And this notion of totality then becomes significant. So let me talk
>> just a little bit about how Marx puts it up. In a totality, you’re
>> dealing with a system of codependence.
>>
>> I went out of interest back to look more closely, but I ended up
>> actually going of all things to artificial intelligence to define
>> what a totality looks like. if I can find it in my papers here. Um,
>> yeah, here here’s this is what GPT says about a totality.
>>
>> Hey, I got to keep up with the with the trend.
>>
>> ChatGPT conveniently defines totality as no single part of society
>> either economic, political, cultural or ideological can be understood
>> in isolation.
>>
>> Each part derives its meaning, function and dynamics from its
>> relationships to the whole system.
>>
>> It’s something that is dynamic as social relations change over time.
>> To understand why this is me, why society works the way it does, you
>> need to understand how all these different things fit together. And
>> that is what Marx’s method is all about.
>>
>> But I’ve given you that notion of totality. But here is how Marx
>> described it which is pretty much close. But although in Marxist
>> language while in a completed bourgeois system, every economic
>> relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois form and everything
>> posited is thus also of presupposition. This is the case with every
>> organic system. The organic system itself as a totality has its
>> presuppositions and its development to its totality consists
>> precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself or in
>> creating out of it the organs like research universities and think
>> tanks which it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a
>> totality. In other words, a totality grows. It’s an organic totality.
>> So therefore, we’re dealing with an organic process.
>>
>> In a sense, what Marx is doing here is to say capital is an ecosystem.
>>
>> It’s and this is very different from a mechanical totality.
>>
>> The ecosystem one is something that is capable of growth which is
>> internal to the system and that growth is seized upon as profit by
>> the capitalists.
>>
>> So the totality then is there and we should start to think of this
>> the economy in terms of totality. Now people find this very difficult
>> in first instance but actually there’s a very simple analogy.
>>
>> I can look upon my body as a totality. The heart can’t exist without
>> the lungs can’t exist without the stomach can’t exist. This is
>> exactly what the GTP is saying and what Marx is saying. It’s totality
>> is caught up in this in this process of becoming and organizing
>> itself. And the human body has many different circulatory processes
>> going on inside of it. And you don’t sit there and say, “I don’t like
>> this concept of totality.” It’s a good way to think about your body.
>> And you also know that if something goes wrong with one of those
>> elements in your body, you’re dead.
>>
>> But each moment has a very specific character. So you’ve got problems
>> with your heart, you go to a cardiologist, you go to, you know,
>> pulmonary therapist. You know there all these specialists out there
>> who do look at the parts but there’s a holistic approach to the human
>> body in which we’re looking at all of them together. And the health
>> of the human body depends very much upon how all those parts relate
>> to each other. But the human heart needs nothing outside of being
>> inside of a body. The lungs mean nothing outside. The lungs mean
>> nothing without its connectivity to the heart with it.
>>
>> So we have a system that works that way. And I’m proposing to you
>> that this is the way we should look upon the economy that there are
>> many different circulatory processes going on. And in the Grundrisse,
>> Mark starts to do that and he singles out just one circulatory
>> process inside of the general circulation. If you look at the general
>> circulation process, you’ll notice one little box which says labor
>> power. So Marx in /Kapital /starts to talk about the circulation of
>> capacity to labor. That’s the second diagram you get here.
>>
>> And this is a very important thing because again it’s not as if labor
>> is stopping. No, labor is moving. The whole thing is keeps in motion.
>>
>> What is a strike about? The strike is about stopping some of this
>> motion going on. choosing one of the moments to block the process.
>>
>> So why I think this is useful is also it helps us understand
>> something. People on the left like to talk about something called the
>> proletariat.
>>
>> You say, well, what is the proletariat? It’s working people and
>> they’re working people. Not necessarily a proletariat. by where does
>> proletarian consciousness come from though that right and Marx argues
>> they the consciousness arises out of experience.
>>
>> So political consciousness your consciousness my consciousness
>> depends very much on the nature of our experiences. And then you say,
>> well, what how in what ways does the circulation of labor power about
>> taking you through different experiences? Start at the bottom of the
>> diagram.
>>
>> I think it’s the bottom anyway. The working person is at home in the
>> morning, wakes up, has their breakfast, takes their kids to school or
>> whatever, and then they go out to get a job, they go into the super
>> into the market in the labor market. So the circulation process of
>> labor power begins from the household, moves into the marketplace.
>>
>> Now most people who have a job have already gone there and got their
>> marketplace but there are a lot of people who are doing it on a daily
>> basis and a lot of people who are with now without their jobs and who
>> are looking for jobs. So the labor market is the second experiential
>> zone and you ask what kind of consciousness comes out of behavior in
>> the labor market. In the labor market you’re unlikely to be very
>> friendly with your co-workers. You’re likely to try to put them down.
>>
>> Those people don’t know how to do it. Hire me, not them. It’s
>> competitive.
>>
>> But one of the things that Mark suggests is that when we start to
>> look at these circulatory processes is we investigate those
>> processes. So what I would want to know is what is the nature of the
>> labor market currently in Mexico? What is it looking like? How are
>> the mechanisms of people finding jobs going on? Are there ways to
>> improve those mechanisms? Are there ways to undermine them? All sorts
>> of things we can ask. In other words, there’s a whole terrain of
>> investigation about the nature of labor markets.
>>
>> But once the labor market is passed through, the worker goes into the
>> labor process where they have to do what the capitalist tells them to
>> do because they are not being sold as persons, but their capacity to
>> labor is being sold as but is is individualized.
>>
>> So the experience of the the working person in the labor process is
>> radically different from that in the supermarket back in the labor
>> market.
>>
>> But at the end of the day, the worker comes out of the workplace and
>> says, “I have some money in my pocket.” And Marx says, “Well, you’re
>> a worker and you got money in your pocket. What are you going to do
>> with it?” You can do all kinds of things with it. You can go and get
>> yourself drunk. You can go and you know fool around, you can save or
>> you can do all sorts of things. But there at that point there is a
>> kind of question which was also there in the labor market which is
>> how do capitalists start to utilize the labor market in such a way
>> that is advantageous to themselves. In other words, class struggle
>> comes up in in very specific kinds of ways. But at the end of the
>> day, the worker is autonomous in terms of the amount of money they
>> have in their pocket.
>>
>> But at this point, it’s interesting because you see that capital who
>> has paid the wages finds all sorts of ways to to actually get the
>> wages back.
>>
>> In other in other words, there’s a lot of exploitation going on in
>> the monetary field. One of the biggest forms of exploitation is
>> credit cards. credit card debt suddenly becomes high and you got that
>> moment where you would think the experience of the worker as a
>> somebody having money will be a happy experience because they can go
>> out and do what they like with it. But if they have to use their
>> credit card, they’re just going to have to pay off their debt. So
>> that’s a very different experience that working person has when
>> they’re in control of money and they’re surrounded by all these
>> institutions of money power which are doing their best to get their
>> money out of their pockets.
>>
>> But if they don’t get it out of the pockets then the worker takes
>> that money and goes into the supermarket and buys food and clothing
>> and all the things you might need. So there they are actually acting
>> as consumers. And here Marx says something very interesting. He says
>> when the when when we get to the point where we’re looking at the
>> worker actually spending money as in consumption they have totally
>> lost their identity as worker and take on the identity of buyer. And
>> their struggle is not capital versus labor. It’s versus the merchants
>> and the like.
>>
>> So then the identity is now and they so you then say what kind of
>> world of political struggle do we get into? What does the working
>> person get into? And we have a sort of notion of a proletariat and we
>> think about the auto worker and the minor and all that kind of thing.
>> But in practice we’re not. We’re all in that circulatory process. And
>> that circulatory process is such as that it can actually be utilized
>> by capital to steal back wages through credit card debt. to steal
>> back the wages by raising the prices of commodities that they buy.
>>
>> In other words, when you think of that circulatory process, there are
>> all different management of points of circulation and we have to ask
>> what kinds of political consciousness comes out of that. And when
>> you’re talking to to workers, sometimes they will say things like,
>> you know, I have a terrible job. I hate my job. I hate everything.
>> It’s absolutely awful, but I get enough money to have a decent house
>> in a dim environment and my household, so I’ll do whatever I do just
>> for my household. If you go to that worker and say, “Hey, come out on
>> strike.” They will say, “No, I keep my household.” So, we have a much
>> better understanding.
>>
>> It’s not a unified proletarian consciousness you’re dealing with.
>> You’re dealing with different political ramifications.
>>
>> That’s right. That’s right. This is then it raises the question, you
>> know, I’m a person who is interested in in furthering political
>> well-being. Where do I go in that in that process? Depends very much
>> on the situation. what is interesting to me is that we’ve just had a
>> mayor elected in New York who is part of a social democratic
>> organization. Where does he take his politics in this system? Well,
>> if he goes in there with a old-fashioned Marxist view and says, “Now,
>> as a good proletarian worker, you do this, you do this, you do this.”
>> People like to say, “Oh, go off.”
>>
>> Actually his politics are all around consumption, affordability,
>> dealing with, you know, trying to trying to to make sure that as
>> little as possible of the well-being which the worker has earned are
>> stolen away by big farmer and big, you know, capital and so on.
>>
>> So the whole kind of question of consumer consciousness and
>> consumerism and so on and the forms it takes and we have a politics
>> left politics right now which doesn’t deal with all of those elements
>> in that in that system. It’s strictly located in this one area and
>> you kind of say to yourself is that right? Well, if I’m a sort of
>> traditional Marxist, I say, well, all of that is secondary. It’s not
>> primary.
>>
>> My argument is no. All these elements are actually equally important.
>> And in a given place, at a given time, there will likely be one form
>> of political consciousness which attaches to a formation in one
>> aspect of this circulation process. If that circulation process
>> changes - drifts around - then you’re ending up with a different kind
>> of politics.
>>
>> Now this is where if you like theorizing and thinking about political
>> activism and so on starts to come together about what happens within
>> a totality because if you work on affordability of housing or
>> something of that kind which is in one part of that thing it’s almost
>> certainly going to impinge upon the financial possibilities which
>> exist through mortgage finance and all the rest of it which is the
>> other side.
>>
>> So this to me is one of the reasons why theorizing in this way is so
>> interesting because it leads you not to answers but to write asking
>> the right kinds of questions and when right asking the right kinds of
>> questions about for example housing affordable housing what does that
>> mean? How can it be produced? By what means? Can you actually have
>> affordable housing by the free market so-called free market?
>>
>> If the answer is, no way can you ever get affordable housing through
>> free market, then you’ve got to find something which is outside of
>> the market in order to answer that need for affordable housing. These
>> are the sorts of arguments you can make.
>>
>> But you are at that point grounded in an understanding of the
>> totality the understanding of that totality as as formerly
>> interesting when you think about the human body. It’s very it’s very
>> complicated when you get with a scalpel inside of it but it’s very
>> simple in terms of of what its meaning is. And I think that this is
>> the same way we have to start to think about the economy right now,
>> because it is doing a lot of damage and I think that probably
>> wherever you go right now, questions of consumerism and consumption
>> and affordability and so on are paramount in many locations. There
>> may be some parts of the world where where it’s not maybe somewhere
>> else but this is this is just one aspect of this of this system.
>>
>> Now I mentioned earlier then that within this system that we’re
>> starting to look at we we start to think about contradictions and the
>> importance and power of contradictions. The contradictions are very
>> fierce in certain in certain dimensions.
>>
>> For example when Marx is doing the work on the falling rate of
>> profit, he suggests that the falling rate of profit which will lead
>> to the end of capitalism can be suspended if you like by employing
>> more workers which says that capital has an interest, a very great
>> interest in population growth. Interestingly, population growth and
>> the growth of consumerism and the growth of everything else roughly
>> parallel themselves over the past 200 or 300 years.
>>
>> So this says that the relationship between capital accumulation and
>> population increase which actually boils down to increase of the wage
>> labor force.
>>
>> Now we’ve been living through a period of a massive increase in the
>> wage labor force. Of course there is natural growth of the population
>> 2 or 3%, 4% or 5% in the 1950s 1960s population reproduction rates
>> were pretty high and they continue to be high but re recent times
>> they’ve gone on come down very significantly. There are now more than
>> 50 or so countries that have zero population growth.
>>
>> That means they have less labor and migration is going to start to
>> become an issue. And some of those countries by the way have zero big
>> countries. I mean places like Italy, Japan, even China now has a has
>> a problem demographic problem of this kind. But you can see that the
>> demographic problem coincides with the consumerism problem.
>>
>> So if you want to get from Markx and a Marxist political economy to
>> an understanding of climate change, the way you would do that is to
>> start to look at the goods and the amount of goods which capital is
>> producing. And that says that capital over the years has undergone a
>> considerable increase in mass. The mass of capital in 1950 for
>> example stood at around $9 trillion globally. Those are the figures
>> that come out of the World Bank and IMF and so on. So yeah, they are
>> $9 trillion. It is now over a hundred trillion dollars.
>>
>> A hundred trillion dollars with an increasing population from
>> something like 4 billion to 8 billion. Just think about that for a
>> moment and think about the stress that must exert upon the
>> environment. Why are we having all these problems of degradation,
>> environmental degradation? Why are we having all of these problems of
>> climate change? There is a connectivity between the rising mass of
>> output and the rising mass of capital. The rising mass of capital
>> counteracts the falling rate of profit nicely. The mobilization of
>> populations has changed. Now the interesting thing is that probably
>> most people don’t think about it, but since 1980 the global wage
>> labor force has increased by two billion people. Two billion. You say
>> well no well yes where did they come from? Part of its natural growth.
>>
>> But the big part was China entered the global labor market. Not only
>> China but certainly a short time after that all of Eastern Europe,
>> Poland etc etc. So there was a huge influx into the global labor
>> market during this period with all sorts of consequences in terms of
>> demand for you know goods and the needs things.
>>
>> The second thing that that happened was that a demographics got
>> connected with increasing feminization of the labor force. More and
>> more women enter the labor force. So when the labor force was just
>> men, it doubles up when people start to have two work two people
>> working in a household. So, so the house the transformation of
>> households and so on has a terrific impact upon the labor reserve.
>>
>> And the third thing is the continued assault upon pre-capitalist or
>> non-capitalist forms of economic organization, particularly the
>> peasantry which has been under assault since the middle of the 19th
>> century but which has really become particularly in Latin America and
>> so on sort of major shifts of that sort.
>>
>> So what you’ve got in the world right now is an increasing wage labor
>> force and that wage labor force needs to be put to work in
>> relationship to the increasing volume of capital which is being
>> produced by that the circular kind of process. So we’re now at this
>> situation where there’s not much room left.
>>
>> I mean those sources of increase in the wage labor force are cannot
>> be repeated and in fact if anything we’re going to see a shrinkage of
>> the wage labor force in the not too distant future which is going to
>> put a lot of stress actually upon the capacity to further expand
>> capital accumulation. So these relationships start to enter into the
>> story.
>>
>> So that when you start to say to yourself what is going on in in in
>> the big diagram at every one of those moments, there’s a little
>> diagram up from the left hand side where we where I talk about the
>> mobilization of wants, needs and desires out of an existing
>> population. If capital is going to expand from 9 trillion to 90
>> trillion, then you have to think about new forms of consumption, new
>> forms of consumerism.
>>
>> And you ask yourself, there’s a tremendous effort right now to do
>> exactly that. One of the things Marx commented on about the dynamics
>> of capital is that consumption time, if consumption times are very
>> long, that’s a barrier to capital accumulation. If we shorten
>> consumption times, then we can go around a bit faster. And if we
>> shorten it even further, we go around even faster.
>>
>> So the speed up has become absolutely astonishing. And in order to
>> speed up, you have to start to produce things that have very low
>> perpetuity character. In other words, you want stuff capital has been
>> very good at making stuff which which falls apart and you do it. It’s
>> planned obsolescence. At the same time, you want to come up with new
>> consumer gimmicks and so on. And you look at electronics industry and
>> you see you see this.
>>
>> Now, this is not something that you say is simply about human wants,
>> needs, and desires. It’s not as if everybody out there was longing
>> for an iPhone and had been longing for an iPhone since time
>> immemorial and finally got it. No, the iPhone came along and it
>> started to change people’s cons and pretty soon society gets
>> organized where if you don’t have an iPhone, you you’re not available
>> for anything.
>>
>> So again, one of the things that Marx does is to start to say these
>> things carry with them certain ideological consequences.
>>
>> And a final point and I want to to make about this. Marx is very
>> aware that his historical materialism is about what is going on in
>> the real world right here and now. But he is very aware aware that
>> those things which are going on in the world right now have
>> consequences in the realm of ideology.
>>
>> So that a lot of the fight which is going to go on is an ideological
>> fight and the ideological fight has to lock into the material
>> changes, but has to do it in such a way that it is divorced from the
>> material changes and the material changes are kind of put to one side
>> in our thinking and we think the whole world is driven by ideological
>> consequences.
>>
>> Now Marx has some very interesting things to say about this. The
>> first thing is that as capital develops so our social relationship
>> changes and becomes instead of interpersonal it becomes a relation of
>> abstraction.
>>
>> Now abstraction is very important. The abstractions of consumerism,
>> the abstractions of how we should do things, the abstractions that
>> occur through the market. I don’t relate to the people who’ve made my
>> shoes and shirts and so on, I don’t know them, but I have a
>> relationship to them, which is a monetary relation. It’s an abstract
>> relation, you know, and people actually miss, you know, people like
>> going to the local farmer and picking up things because they can have
>> a chat with a local farmer.
>>
>> Those sorts of dependency relationships were there in very strong
>> terms in the 18th century, but every century since then has seen more
>> and more of these relations turned into abstractions.
>>
>> Now, here’s an interesting question. How do you fight class struggle
>> against abstractions? It’s a bit difficult.
>>
>> But what we have to do is we have to understand how the abstractions
>> are working and what is going on in the world of abstractions and
>> that we can then have to address them by counter abstractions. That
>> is what I am doing here in the sense that I’m simply trying to alert
>> you to the idea that the abstractions need to be addressed and that
>> the abstractions if they’re there are likely to do damage in their
>> own right.
>>
>> And here too we come back to the abstractions which are being
>> absolutely created through artificial intelligence.
>>
>> I mean I have no idea where this is going to end up but you can see
>> little pieces of what might happen in a big jigsaw. There is a big
>> change underway away. big the big change which is pretty much
>> equivalent to de-industrialization of the 1960s 1970s and 1980s.
>>
>> So if we have a better understanding of the of the abstractions how
>> they’re formed then we can intervene somewhat in the nature of
>> abstractions. But Marx has a wonderful way of writing about this. If
>> I can find the the passages in here.
>>
>> Here he says, “As the market exchange system becomes more general and
>> systematized, so participants acquire objective dependency relations,
>> objective dependency.” Your dependency in the grocery is not a
>> subjective relation in the sense that it’s, you know, personal. It’s
>> an objective relation.
>>
>> The abstraction or idea, sorry, no individuals are now ruled by
>> abstractions whereas earlier they depended on one another. To what
>> degree then are we confronted by abstractions forged through market
>> processes rather than exchange racial rel relations with individual
>> persons? The abstraction or idea, says Marx, “is nothing more than
>> the theoretical expression of those material relations which are
>> their lord and master. The ruling ideas are those of the ruling
>> class. Philosophers have determined that the regime of ideas is the
>> peculiarity of any new age. They have consequently identified the
>> creation of free individuality with the ideological overthrow of this
>> regime. This error was all the more easily committed from the
>> ideological standpoint as this regime appears within the
>> consciousness of individuals as the reign of ideas. The belief in the
>> permanence of these ideas i.e. these abstract objective relations of
>> dependency is of course consolidated nourished and inculcated by the
>> ruling classes by all means available.”
>>
>> This was exactly what Hayek, Milton Freeman, Keith Joseph, the
>> Institute of Economic Affairs, Margaret Thatcher and backed by
>> neoliberal think tanks funded by the billionaire class set about
>> doing. In other words, there is a refraction of many of the processes
>> that I’ve been talking about in the world of ideas. And we having to
>> look very carefully now about the way those ideas are being played
>> around with, fooled around with and turned into oppositions. The
>> ideological dimension to this is not independent of the material
>> qualities.
>>
>> But at the same time, it is possible to start to just utilize the
>> ideological arguments without reference to the historical materialist
>> and I would call it historical geographical materialist situations in
>> which people find themselves.
>>
>> We have a tremendous obligation, it seems to me, to try to find out
>> what first off how why these abstractions are occurring to try to get
>> a better understanding of of the political economy that lies behind
>> it and then at the same time recognize that the ideological struggles
>> that are building around us are of such qualities that they are
>> actually amounting to a radical transformation of the epistemic
>> situation that we are in. That is a heavy load to pass on to the next
>> generation, but I’m sufficiently old enough not to have to think too
>> strongly about it. So, I will leave you with that thought. Thank you.
>>
>> On 2026/04/07 16:32, Patrick Bond wrote:
>>>
>>> https://cosmonautmag.com/2026/03/the-marxist-in-residence-an-interview-with-david-harvey/
>>>
>>> *The Marxist in Residence: an interview with David Harvey*
>>>
>>> March 27, 2026
>>>
>>> *Interviewed by Ira Pollock*
>>>
>>> EXCERPT
>>>
>>> *David Harvey: *Imperialism is a political process of the imposition
>>> of economic activity in one state by another. Now I prefer to say
>>> that many things that we are looking at can be better explained by
>>> thinking of them in terms of what I call a spatial fix.
>>>
>>> So when, for example, South Korea becomes. Look at the situation, at
>>> the end of the 1960s Japan was beginning to produce surpluses. It
>>> could not contain those surpluses within Japan, so Japan starts
>>> exporting capital. And that’s when the Japanese auto industry starts
>>> to flood in. So you then say, well, actually this is the Japanese
>>> absorbing their surpluses by creating foreign markets.
>>>
>>> Now would you say that’s imperialism? Many people started to call
>>> this imperialism. I didn’t call it imperialism because I didn’t see
>>> gunboats enforcing things upon the Japanese.
>>>
>>> A few years later, all of a sudden, South Korea starts to get
>>> surpluses and so South Korean firms you’ll find them scattered
>>> around in Africa and Latin America and all the rest of it. And the
>>> automobile industry in South Korea starts to have a market in the
>>> United States and South Korean capital starts to move into China.
>>>
>>> Again, is that imperialist? I didn’t see it politically as
>>> imperialist. I saw it as a process of absorption of surplus capacity
>>> through a spatial fix. That is, finding a place where you could take
>>> your surpluses and put them to work.
>>>
>>> So if you find a textile factory in Guatemala which is owned by a
>>> Taiwanese company, again this is a spatial fix because Taiwan
>>> started to produce surpluses in the 1980s. So did South Korea, so
>>> did Japan had earlier.
>>>
>>> And so you know I prefer to use this language of spatial fix and say
>>> capital is moving from one place to another. It moves from where
>>> it’s in surplus to places where it can gain an easy profit. And in
>>> some ways, Britain had a lot of surplus capital after sort of 1850
>>> and a lot of that surplus capital went to the United States. And we
>>> wouldn’t say that this was an imperialist endeavor.
>>>
>>> What was an imperialist endeavor was the way the British started to
>>> use India as a dumping ground for surplus consumer goods, in
>>> particular clothing and cloth from Manchester ending up in India. So
>>> I find the definition of imperialism for me is much more about the
>>> domination of one economy by other economies.
>>>
>>> And in fact the political domination is not there in many of the
>>> cases that I wanted to look at. All of the cases I’ve talked about I
>>> don’t think anybody would talk about as imperialism, but they’re
>>> terribly important cases.
>>>
>>> And there’s a there’s a big debate right now over, for instance,
>>> China. China has a Belt and Road Initiative and it’s understandable
>>> that China has a lot of surpluses. Where’s it going to send them? So
>>> it sets up this Belt and Road Initiative which is going to open up
>>> European markets more easily to Chinese goods. And of course the
>>> Chinese are using muscle power, state muscle power.
>>>
>>> So there is an imperialist element within the Chinese Belt and Road
>>> Initiative. But it’s just an element, not the basic problem. The
>>> basic problem is that the Chinese had surplus productive capacity
>>> and didn’t know what to do with it.
>>>
>>> And the same thing happened many years ago. All the railroads in
>>> Argentina were built by the British. And it was built by the British
>>> because the British had a big surplus of iron and steel and they
>>> needed places to put it. So, rolling stock and railways in Argentina
>>> made sense. So, they covered Argentina in railroads. Again, in what
>>> ways is that imperialist, in the sense that Argentina didn’t
>>> actually like it and enjoy it and enjoy the benefits of it.
>>>
>>> Then comes the question of when Argentinian debt had a hard time
>>> being paid off, and the British sent gunboats to try and track the
>>> debt by violence.
>>>
>>> So I tend to think about imperialism as very much a
>>> political-military kind of posture. But much of what goes on in
>>> terms of international trade and that international transfer of
>>> capital from one part of the world to another, goes on according to
>>> a different logic than the imperialist logic of imperial domination.
>>>
>>> *Ira:*I want to maybe dig into that a little bit more. But just to
>>> paraphrase, the spatial fix framing is basically saying capitalism
>>> has expansionist tendencies, and produces surpluses that need to be
>>> invested and capitalists are going to shop around the world for the
>>> best investment opportunities for those surpluses. Their domestic
>>> market is saturated. They’re going to look overseas.
>>>
>>> *David: *Yes.
>>>
>>> *Ira: *And so saying that every time that happens is imperialism
>>> blurs the line between when you have, say, a military or an
>>> aggressive state actor facilitating that expansion through
>>> politically dominating another territory.
>>>
>>> *David: *Yes.
>>>
>>> *Ira:*So you already have a natural expansionist tendency of
>>> capital. It sometimes is accompanied by a coercive state dominating
>>> another nation to facilitate that expansion and sometimes it’s not.
>>> And you want to reserve the term imperialism for those instances
>>> where the state steps in, politically dominates another nation to
>>> facilitate that expansion.
>>>
>>> *David: *Yes.
>>>
>>> *Ira: *Got it. So in the case of Argentina, and you mentioned this
>>> yourself, if those assets were endangered, would the British crown
>>> then step in and politically dominate Argentina to secure those
>>> investments, to secure that infrastructure? Would that then become
>>> imperialism?
>>>
>>> *David: *Well, that would be the imperialist answer to the problem.
>>> A lot of the time, the British state in recent years has not been
>>> powerful enough to send gunboats and exercise diplomacy of the sort
>>> of saying, give us our money back. So other means have to be set up.
>>>
>>> *Ira: *Right. In the US, the American South has a lot of foreign
>>> auto factories. We have a lot of Hyundai factories in the South,
>>> Volkswagen factories in the South. And that doesn’t necessarily mean
>>> that South Korea is in an imperialist relationship where they are
>>> sort of the core and we’re the periphery now because they have used
>>> us as a territory to invest in, right? The fact that we have South
>>> Korean companies or German companies in our borders doesn’t mean
>>> they are imperializing us. But under the narrative of spatial fix,
>>> it makes sense. Under the narrative of imperialism, it doesn’t. So
>>> your argument would be a lot of what you see with, say, Japanese
>>> investments in East Asia, it’s that same logic. It’s just they’re
>>> looking for spatial fixes.
>>>
>>> *David: *Yes.
>>>
>>> *Ira:*Got it. A couple of years ago, I watched a panel that you were
>>> on with a handful of other academics. I remember Nancy Fraser was
>>> there. You made a claim that a lot of folks took exception to. I
>>> think it was a question of unequal exchange and that through supply
>>> chains, there is still a transfer of value from East to West. I
>>> don’t want to misquote you, but if I recall correctly, you said
>>> something to the effect that the unequal exchange between East and
>>> West is not what it used to be and that now we actually see it in
>>> reverse flows. And I remember the Monthly Review folks took great
>>> interest in that and wrote some articles proving that the unequal
>>> exchange really maintains with a transfer of value into the US as an
>>> imperial core. Do you know the debate?
>>>
>>> *David: *Yeah, yeah, yeah I know the debate.
>>>
>>> *Ira: *I never read or saw a response by you to this pretty common
>>> position amongst the Monthly Review crowd and big portions of the
>>> left that unequal exchange still is very robust and basically
>>> siphoning value into a US-centered imperial core. What do you make
>>> of this argument?
>>>
>>> *David: *Well, there are a number of aspects to it. And one is that:
>>> ‘unequal exchange redounds to the benefit of the United States, for
>>> example, which means that value is being extracted from China.’
>>>
>>> And I’m sorry, I think actually a lot of value is currently being
>>> extracted from the rest of the world by China. There will be people
>>> who say, no, that’s not the case. And the Monthly Review crowd are
>>> very strong: ‘But you can’t say that China is extracting value from
>>> the rest of the world because then China would be an imperialist
>>> power.’
>>>
>>> All along in these arguments, I’m interested in where is the flow of
>>> capital going and what does it do when it gets there and what
>>> backflow comes back in the way of profit? We have a situation right
>>> now where that question of what is going on with capital flows is a
>>> monumental problem.
>>>
>>> I don’t know quite how to go about tracking it. It’s the kind of
>>> thing where if I had about 30 researchers and we could set up a
>>> thing, we could do something to find out exactly where capital is
>>> going, what it’s doing, and how it gets there. My intuition about it
>>> is to say, well, saying that it all goes this way, I doubt it. I
>>> doubt it. I really do.
>>>
>>> And I think if you make the presumption that it always goes this
>>> way, then that course leads you into a certain politics. And I think
>>> that the Chinese are extracting quite a bit of value from around the
>>> world. You look at Chinese mineral mining companies.
>>>
>>> It’s interesting when this Venezuela thing came up and people
>>> started to say, ‘well, what was happening to Venezuelan oil?’ Well,
>>> the Chinese were in there. So what China is doing, I’m just reading
>>> the newspapers and Financial Times and things like that, and I get
>>> some idea about it.
>>>
>>> But I am against the assertion of the Monthly Review that there is
>>> no transfer of value going on from, say, Zimbabwe to China, because
>>> I think that there is a great deal, because things like the Copper
>>> Belt and so on, the Chinese have got some of their companies in
>>> there, and doing things. And the Chinese have spent some time in
>>> Ecuador. I quickly learned that the biggest investor in Ecuador was
>>> China. And they were building huge hydroelectric facilities and
>>> things like that.
>>>
>>> And you go on and say, ‘well, why are they doing that?’ Well, the
>>> Chinese production capacity has always been very large, and they
>>> have a long time had surplus value absorption in Ecuador,
>>> particularly around mineral rights and oil extraction and so on. So
>>> all I’m saying is, don’t be too glib about saying the value is
>>> flowing, it can flow in all sorts of ways.
>>>
>>> I liken it to water flows. There can be leakages over here and the
>>> water can all be flowing out there. So somebody may be piling up
>>> loads of value somewhere in the world, possibly in one of these tax
>>> havens. And you kind of go, well, that’s where capital is now located.
>>>
>>> It’s now located in the Bahamas. And you go to the Bahamas and you
>>> don’t see anything, except you know that the Bahamas has probably
>>> the biggest stock of surplus capital of anyone these days.
>>>
>>> So I’m a little wary of what do we know about these value flows. I
>>> can look at stuff on terms of trade and things of that sort. But I
>>> think the Monthly Review assertion is that it’s just that it’s an
>>> assertion without any necessary material base.
>>>
>>> *Ira: *So if I understand what you’re saying, it’s not that we can
>>> clearly nail down exactly what value flows are happening in the
>>> world. In theory, we could, but we haven’t. But one thing that
>>> certainly appears to be the case is that China is at least not a
>>> strictly peripheral country that’s being exploited by the West. It
>>> is also extracting value from the rest of the world, including
>>> countries in the Western Hemisphere and particularly in Latin America.
>>>
>>> *David: *And even the United States. And even the United States. The
>>> biggest holders of U.S. treasuries are China...
>>>
>>> *Roy: *Hmm. So if the claim is that China sort of occupies this
>>> semi-peripheral, semi-core position where it might be extracting a
>>> lot of value from the rest of the world, is your assertion that it’s
>>> not the case that then, in turn, the U.S., acting as a core, like a
>>> strictly core country, then extracts more value out of China than,
>>> say, China extracts out of the U.S.? So you could say that, yes,
>>> China is extracting plenty of value out of the rest of the world.
>>> But then, in turn, companies centered in the U.S., through their
>>> investments in China, are net extractors of value from China. And
>>> maybe even, you know, taking some of that value that China extracts
>>> out of the rest of the world. So the end point still ends up being
>>> U.S. firms.
>>>
>>> *David: *Well, my point about this also is that these flows shift.
>>> And we may be in a situation right now where somebody else is
>>> extracting the value flows. And we don’t know exactly where they’re
>>> going.
>>>
>>> I mean, in 2008, for example, we had a crisis of global capitalism,
>>> but the Chinese compensated for it. They lost about 30 million jobs
>>> because the U.S. consumer market collapsed, and they lost 30 million
>>> jobs. But then, two years later, the IMF said the net loss of jobs
>>> in China was around 3 million compared to 14 million in the United
>>> States.
>>>
>>> They lost very little. Why? Because they invested huge amounts of
>>> money in urbanization. They built whole cities. They built a whole
>>> huge network of high-speed trains and everything. I mean, the
>>> investment there. And that, of course, created a huge demand for
>>> copper and all the rest of it.
>>>
>>> So if you were in Chile during those years of 2008, you would have
>>> said, well, actually, it’s not too bad because the copper industry
>>> was doing fine because of the Chinese. So China sort of rescued
>>> global capitalism at that time by this huge investment in urban
>>> infrastructures.
>>>
>>> In 2021, 2022, all of their developer companies started going
>>> bankrupt, like Evergrande and so on. So in a sense, a collapsed
>>> process in the United States of urbanization led into the crisis of
>>> 2008. The Chinese got us out of it by investment in housing and
>>> property and all the rest of it. And now they’re in trouble. So this
>>> is a very volatile situation.
>>>
>>> And who’s benefiting from whom at any one particular moment can
>>> shift around. And again, coming back to this process thinking and
>>> say, we can’t firmly say exactly this year, the flows were going
>>> this way because they can turn around and go the other way. I mean,
>>> we’re seeing a reorientation in global funds these days through the
>>> oil price shift.
>>>
>>> So who’s benefiting from that? And why? And what kind of stress is
>>> that giving to China? Because China right now needs Middle Eastern oil.
>>>
>>> *Ira: *Right. It goes back to that idea that capitalism doesn’t
>>> really solve its problems or solve its crises. It just
>>> geographically shifts them around or temporally shifts them around.
>>> It can put them off to some date in the future, or it can put them
>>> off, load them off on some other nation or sector.
>>>
>>> *David: *Right.
>>>
>>> *Ira: *So what do you make of the debate around whether China is
>>> capitalist and imperialist?
>>>
>>> *David: *I don’t think it’s very interesting.
>>>
>>> *Ira: *It’s interesting that you don’t think it’s interesting. I’m
>>> interested to hear.
>>>
>>> *David: *Well, you know, I mean, a lot of people, a lot of people,
>>> it seems to me, are taking refuge by putting something in a pot and
>>> saying, ah, yes, there it is. My view of capital is it’s not sitting
>>> in a pot. It’s perpetually in motion. There are times when it’s
>>> moving this way versus that way, and times when it reverses.
>>>
>>> At the same time, the main thing about capital is it grows. For me,
>>> the most important thing is where is it growing fastest and where
>>> are the necessities, the labor, the raw materials and all the rest
>>> of it coming from to fund that growth?
>>>
>>> That gets us into the kind of question of extractivism, and how much
>>> extractivism is occurring and where.
>>>
>>> And you have the situation, for example, when Trump starts to mess
>>> around with China on the tariffs, the Chinese one day said, ‘OK,
>>> we’re cutting off the flow of rare earth metals.’ Well, that kills
>>> most of them, you know.
>>>
>>> So at a given point, when China says something like that. You say,
>>> ‘is that an imperialist move they’re making?’ Because that cuts off
>>> the flow of rare earth metals from China. China’s about 85 percent
>>> of the whole global production.
>>>
>>> That global production is underpinning all of this artificial
>>> intelligence and all the rest of it. All of that will collapse if
>>> the Chinese decide that they’re not going to mine any more rare
>>> earth metals.
>>>
>>> If I was an Iranian right now, what would I do? If I was Iranian
>>> right now, I would go in and I’d block the Strait of Hormuz forever.
>>> And then what happens at prices and who gets what from whom? I mean,
>>> you see my point. I mean, these are sort of massive events.
>>>
>>> *Ira: *So there’s this argument that whether something’s socialism
>>> or capitalism depends less on, well, I mean, it obviously depends on
>>> the economic processes. But fundamentally, it means what forces in
>>> society are hegemonic, what forces are exercising political control.
>>> So you could have capitalist processes that exist at the mercy of a
>>> socialist state. And likewise, you could have what some might
>>> consider socialist processes that capitalists allow to exist, like
>>> robust public housing in Singapore. So the question is, is capital
>>> doing the disciplining or is some other entity doing the
>>> disciplining? And you’ll hear this argument that as democratic as
>>> the U.S. can pretend to be, capital absolutely disciplines the U.S.
>>> state. The U.S. state operates at the mercy of capital, whereas
>>> capitalists could never call the shots for the Politburo. The
>>> Politburo lets capital exist in certain sectors and then disciplines
>>> capital when it wants to. So yes, capitalism as an economic
>>> formation obviously exists in China. But is the state capable of
>>> disciplining that?
>>>
>>> *David: *Well, for me, just watching the Chinese
>>> experiment—experiment is the wrong word, but I think you know what I
>>> mean—examining it, I find it fascinating that there are certain
>>> rules of the game of capital which the Chinese find that they have
>>> to follow.
>>>
>>> For example, in 1978 or whenever it was when the Chinese reform
>>> started, China had no banks. Essentially, the banks were dead. The
>>> five largest banks in the world are now Chinese.
>>>
>>> And you kind of go, well, did the Chinese sit down and say, okay,
>>> this is what we want to do, and they all planned it all out? Or did
>>> the logic of the situation they were in mandate that at some point
>>> or other they start to take banking seriously? And they started to
>>> use mortgage banking and all kinds of things like that because they
>>> wanted to build the railways and they wanted to build new cities and
>>> all the rest of it.
>>>
>>> You can’t do all of that. The rule, as I see it, that Marx has, is
>>> that fixed capital formation takes surpluses of capital and puts it
>>> into fixed capital, which will improve the productivity of labor.
>>> That’s what it’s supposed to do. That’s the rule.
>>>
>>> So the Chinese started to invest in fixed capital, but in order to
>>> do that, they had to allow the banks in, to start to do it. And the
>>> banks, once they were set up to finance the fixed capital formation,
>>> found themselves having to create more and more money because more
>>> and more financing was needed for all these new cities and
>>> infrastructures that were being built.
>>>
>>> So what you’ve got is this situation where the Chinese in 1978
>>> didn’t really have efficient banking, but by the time you get to the
>>> end of the 1990s, they’d been forced by the logic of their own
>>> experience to set up a banking system that can accommodate the needs
>>> of fixed capital formation. And that banking system is very
>>> powerful, very large, and all of the directors are party members. So
>>> the banks don’t do what the US banks did in 2008 when they were
>>> given extra surplus money and it was expected that they spend it,
>>> but they didn’t.
>>>
>>> They just used the money to retire their debt. So the financial
>>> solutions 2008 in the United States was appallingly wrong. The
>>> Chinese would never allow banks to say, we’re not going to do what
>>> you tell us. The banks just do what the central bureau says, so
>>> they’re different kinds of banks to what we have in the United
>>> States. But the result of that is they have banks which are the
>>> largest banks in the world.
>>>
>>> And that comes about not because the Chinese in 1978 said, ah, we
>>> have to have the largest five banks in the world, it came about
>>> because they set in motion a development process that required debt
>>> financing and interest-bearing capital and all the rest of it, which
>>> is a part of the rules of what capital is about.
>>>
>>> So when you know the rules of what capital is about, you see in what
>>> respects China was forced to follow those rules. And in following
>>> those rules has set up the equivalent of a capitalist economy with
>>> Chinese characteristics, which means the heads of every bank know
>>> perfectly well that if Beijing says do this, they do it.
>>>
>>> In the United States, if the president called the banks and said you
>>> have to do this, the banks would tell him to get lost. That’s the
>>> difference between the United States and China, quite simply.
>>>
>>> *Ira: *Right. So even if a particular capitalist or firm or cartel
>>> of capitalists and firms wanted to discipline the Politburo, they
>>> can’t. The Politburo still, if it wants to develop the economy, it
>>> has to obey the capitalist laws of value. Yes. I’m coming out of
>>> this and I still don’t I still don’t know.
>>>
>>> *David: *Well, the interesting moment was when China joined the WTO.
>>> That was the Americans said it’s got to come in because, you know,
>>> and the rule there is that the Chinese were given four or five years
>>> to adapt to the rules of WTO, which create which say that the
>>> economy should be certified as a market economy.
>>>
>>> And what you’re saying is not exactly a market economy. And that is
>>> indeed what is the case. And all the powers have to fudge everything
>>> to make sure they don’t kick China out of the WTO because all hell
>>> will break loose if they did.
>>>
>>> *Ira: *Yeah. I’m looking for some really simple political solutions
>>> and we’re not getting them. I kind of want to talk about the
>>> political stakes of this debate, but it sounds like that’s there’s,
>>> like we don’t know. So just in the interest of time, if you had to
>>> give me a thesis on the question of whether China’s capitalist and
>>> imperialist, what would that one sentence thesis be?
>>>
>>> *David: *It’s a mixed economy.
>>>
>>> *Ira: *A mixed economy. Does it exist in that state at the mercy of
>>> the Communist Party or is the.
>>>
>>> *David: *Again, if you call imperialism a fixed or you have a fixed
>>> definition of imperialism, you come up with a whole set of answers.
>>> Does China fit into this pot with these characteristics? I think the
>>> way you should think of imperialism is of imperialist practices.
>>>
>>> Like there’s no question that, for example, Japan on occasion has
>>> used imperialist practices in relationship to its debtors. OK, but
>>> it is not an imperialist country. But there are occasions when
>>> imperialist practices can be set up. What Trump did in Venezuela is
>>> a good example.
>>>
>>> *Ira: *Sorry, just to clarify, you said Japan. Yes. So we shifted
>>> from talking about China to Japan, right? Yeah, well, yeah. Right,
>>> just making sure for listeners.
>>>
>>> *David: *Yeah, well, China has some imperialist practices. There’s
>>> no question about it. In my view, I read about how they manage their
>>> copper belt companies. They have imperialist practices with Chinese
>>> characteristics.
>>>
>>> The interesting thing is that when the prices collapsed in the
>>> copper belt, the only company that remained in production, even
>>> though it was unprofitable, was the Chinese company. So when this
>>> whole thing came back, the Chinese were in a good position to dominate.
>>>
>>> But let’s define imperialist practices. Classic ones are gunboats
>>> sailing up the Yangtze and blowing off the rest of it. So you can
>>> have some and then say, well, every country has some imperialist
>>> practices.
>>>
>>> To this day, Britain has some imperialist practices, but they’re
>>> fairly minor, not very significant. The US engaged in imperialist
>>> practices by what it did in Venezuela. That’s a classic example of
>>> imperialist practices.
>>>
>>> And if people want to say, look, that’s a good example of
>>> imperialism. It’s a good example of imperialism, but it’s not an
>>> example of American imperialism. And there’s the idea that all
>>> imperialism is located in the United States.
>>>
>>> Yeah, the United States does some imperialistic things like that.
>>> It’s about to try and do imperialistic things in relationship to
>>> Cuba. No doubt that it’s into solidifying, if it possibly can, Latin
>>> America as a privileged trading partner in its own backyard.
>>>
>>> It’s trying to do that. I think there’s no question about that. The
>>> interesting thing to me is to say, in what ways is the United States
>>> pursuing imperialist practices in the current era? That, for me, is
>>> a much more important question than the simple question, can I put
>>> the United States in this pot called imperialist?
>>>
>>> What do I do about the fact that the French have been engaging in
>>> some imperialist practices? Are they in this pot called imperialist?
>>> Is Japan in this pot called imperialist? They all are capable of
>>> engaging in imperialist practices.
>>>
>>> So for me, the idea of imperialism is mostly about, okay, what are
>>> the imperialist practices? Whose practices are in where in a given
>>> historical moment? And so you may find at this moment, the United
>>> States is being imperialist about this. A new administration may
>>> come in and they may cut it out. And so they’re no longer following
>>> that imperialist practice.
>>>
>>> For example, for many years, the United States military trained all
>>> of the police forces and military people in Latin America and the
>>> School of the Americas in Panama. And that was an imperialist
>>> practice, no question about it. But then it closed the school. And
>>> so they’re no longer engaging in that imperialist practice.
>>>
>>> Does that mean the United States is no longer engaging in
>>> imperialist practices? No. It’s got it all over the place. But we
>>> have to be specific about what the nature of imperialist practices are.
>>>
>>> And that’s why I get in this argument with Monthly Review and all
>>> the rest of it. Is China in the pot called imperialist? My answer
>>> would be, ‘Well I have no idea.’ But I do want to ask the question,
>>> ‘Where are the imperialist practices?’ Belt and Road is a very
>>> interesting example: it’s very close to imperial practices.
>>>
>>> I want to feel free to say that and not necessarily say, therefore,
>>> that ‘China is imperialist.’ Because what does that get you?
>>>
>>> On 2026/03/08 13:42, Patrick Bond wrote:
>>>>
>>>> (There's a remarkable new book
>>>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y7YLX-ASGY> by David Harvey,
>>>> discussed late last month in Verso's Brooklyn studio. Verso was
>>>> David's publisher of choice, for good reason. What a wonderful
>>>> service, this oral presentation is - especially the last sentence
>>>> or two, for humorous flavor.)
>>>>
>>>> *THE STORY OF CAPITAL *
>>>>
>>>> *by David Harvey*
>>>>
>>>> *What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works*
>>>>
>>>> *https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y7YLX-ASGY*
>>>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y7YLX-ASGY>
>>>>
>>>> **
>>>>
>>>> If you are in a thoughtful mood, then in order to grapple with
>>>> underlying 'requirements of capital accumulation' via Karl Marx's
>>>> /Kapital/, do listen <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y7YLX-ASGY>
>>>> - and read the transcript, below - as *David Harvey* makes a
>>>> YouTube comeback after a year's silence:
>>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y7YLX-ASGY
>>>>
>>>> His brand new book, /The Story of Capital, /is just out this
>>>> month from Verso Press. Normally, there's not much merit in even
>>>> glancing at viewer comments. However in this case, why not: as much
>>>> as I'm a permanent fan of my PhD supervisor, it's wonderful to see
>>>> even the first page of 100+ loving comments, in the box below.
>>>>
>>>> * Below me (here in Johannesburg) was once, in a 200km radius,
>>>> half the world's historic supply of gold
>>>> <https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-origin-of-gold-in-south-africa>,*
>>>> as recently as 1970 (about 45 000 tonnes). So I most enjoyed the
>>>> section of his talk dealing with extractivism. More than at any
>>>> time in his career, I think now he has a brilliant way of
>>>> connecting up labour, minerals and agriculture, pointing to an
>>>> eco-socialist (also hopefully feminist, anti-imperialist)
>>>> understanding of how capital tears these relations asunder. Judge
>>>> for yourself in the box below.
>>>>
>>>> Oh, the best moment in David's online introduction is
>>>> the Afterword:
>>>>
>>>> * Verso: Just hold for a moment for the siren. Just let it
>>>> let it go by.
>>>> * David: It was nice to have sirens going. You kind of say,
>>>> "Hey, hey, the revolution's going on out there." [laughter]
>>>>
>>>> Keep as strong as David Harvey, and as the times demand,
>>>>
>>>> Patrick
>>>>
>>>> ***
>>>>
>>>> *In /The Story of Capital,/ the world's foremost Marxist geographer
>>>> and economist takes us by the hand on a tour of contemporary
>>>> capitalism.*
>>>>
>>>> Over the decades, David Harvey has won the acclaim of students and
>>>> academics for his teaching of Marx’s work, with a particular focus
>>>> on Capital. Chapter by chapter – sometimes line by line – he has
>>>> analysed and expatiated on Marx’s three volumes and the Grundrisse.
>>>> Now in The Story of Capital, this mental universe, populated by
>>>> observations gleaned from a lifetime of scholarship, becomes
>>>> accessible to the general reader.
>>>>
>>>> Harvey presents an overview of the key concepts across Marx’s work
>>>> and its central themes, from labour and technology to the state and
>>>> geopolitics, via the profit rate, social reproduction, capital’s
>>>> relationship to nature, fictitious capital, and the return of the
>>>> rentiers.
>>>>
>>>> The Story of Capital is destined to endure as a reference work for
>>>> all those trying to grasp the nature of contemporary capitalism.
>>>>
>>>> The Story of Capital by David Harvey is available now from Verso
>>>> Books:
>>>> https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3372-the-story-of-capital
>>>>
>>>> 00:00 Introduction
>>>> 00:56 Preface
>>>> 01:47 The Circulation of Labour Capacity and the Origin of Profit
>>>> 05:13 Technological Dynamism and the Productivity of Labour
>>>> 08:11 Extractivism and the Metabolic Relation to Nature
>>>> 10:51The Troublesome Case of Fictitious Capital
>>>> 15:35 The State-Finance Nexus and The Geopolitics of Capital
>>>> 17:44 Conclusion
>>>>
>>>> *Extractivism and the Metabolic Relation to Nature *
>>>>
>>>> Marx looks at nature as a vast repository of potentially use values
>>>> for production. So extractivism is Marx's way of saying there's
>>>> something there that initially should be a free good. But by the
>>>> time the capitalists have got taken ownership of it they can turn
>>>> it into a site for rent extraction and property enhancement. And so
>>>> ownership of those sites is about owning the extractive
>>>> possibilities. And the kind of economy that results – an
>>>> extractivist economy – where they don't make anything or do
>>>> anything other than just simply take money and appropriate money
>>>> for the use of the resources which lie embedded in the land. Which
>>>> in a sense should be free goods available to everyone.
>>>>
>>>> All production, says Marx, is appropriation of nature on the part
>>>> of an individual within and through the specific form of society.
>>>>
>>>> This is Marx's first step towards a holistic dialectical
>>>> interpretation of the relation to nature. The relation to nature is
>>>> deemed metabolic. This refers to a relation between two or more
>>>> elements or moments that are so intertwined that one element cannot
>>>> exist independently of the other. Human labor in this sense we are
>>>> now considering it is defined by its metabolic role in transforming
>>>> elements of nature into useful products to support human life. The
>>>> labor theory of value rests on this metabolic relation.
>>>>
>>>> Unfortunately, industrial capital disturbs the metabolic relation
>>>> between man and the earth. It prevents the return to the soil of
>>>> its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and
>>>> clothing. Hence, it hinders the operation of the eternal natural
>>>> condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. The destructive
>>>> consequences are everywhere apparent in capital.
>>>>
>>>> Marx puts it this way: capitalist agriculture is a process in the
>>>> art not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil. The
>>>> more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background
>>>> of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more
>>>> rapid is the process of destruction.
>>>>
>>>> Capitalist production therefore only develops the techniques and
>>>> degrees of combination of the social process of production by
>>>> simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth, the
>>>> soil and the worker.
>>>>
>>>> ***
>>>>
>>>> *THE STORY OF CAPITAL by David Harvey | What Everyone Should Know
>>>> About How Capital Works
>>>> Verso Books
>>>> 30,671 views 24 Feb 2026*
>>>> Add a comment…
>>>> @maartenjansen8820
>>>> 11 days ago
>>>> His close reading classes through the 3 volumes of Capital are
>>>> fantastic. I rewrote whole pieces out of capital in notebook in
>>>> order to get it. After that I watched his class on that chapter. I
>>>> wished other experts on political philosophy did the same. It is so
>>>> worthwhile to really focus on an important work as Capital.
>>>> Harvey's classes were very formative for me, as a citizen.
>>>> 64
>>>> @siyahbeyaz9527
>>>> 11 days ago
>>>> Even at this age, he is still producing. What an inspiration!
>>>> 65
>>>> @victorsherazee
>>>> 8 days ago
>>>> That man is 90 years old and still putting out a book. Got to
>>>> respect that 🫡
>>>> 6
>>>> @figueroa661
>>>> 9 days ago
>>>> Harvey opened so many doors for me as a young adult learning about
>>>> Marxism and socialism. I'm so glad he's still sharing his profound
>>>> and so accessible knowledge.
>>>> 8
>>>> @BigTree-s1j
>>>> 11 days ago (edited)
>>>> Happy 90th birthday Harvey Homie.
>>>> 45
>>>> @TSBOY22
>>>> 9 days ago
>>>> felt so blessed to be his student a few years ago at CUNY,
>>>> listening to his analysis of the Grundrisse all semester long.
>>>> Happy birthday and good health, David!
>>>> 3
>>>> @nicosge6742
>>>> 11 days ago
>>>> incredible human being. thx for everything!
>>>> 22
>>>> @dokwonhasyourtendies1657
>>>> 1 day ago
>>>> Always good to check in with Dr. Harvey to stabilize your world
>>>> view. Props!
>>>> @Grumpeltiltskin
>>>> 8 days ago
>>>> Thank you for this piece, it inspired me to buy David's book from
>>>> your store. I am just discovering Marxism, but it's critique of
>>>> Capitalism answers so many of the questions about why life now is
>>>> so hard for so many, and for example why UK water companies are
>>>> essentially poisoning our rivers and beaches. We need to act now to
>>>> reign it in.
>>>> 3
>>>> @mjleger
>>>> 11 days ago
>>>> great to hear from David Harvey and i look forward to this new book
>>>> 10
>>>> @andylane3739
>>>> 8 days ago
>>>> Nice update of Marx's theses - now the "appendage of the machine"
>>>> has to RE-train itself a couple times just to survive.
>>>> So, now we do HOMEWORK after work.
>>>> Aren't we tired enough?
>>>> 4
>>>> @foriegnuniter
>>>> 2 days ago
>>>> There is no need for that ending beat to be that HARD
>>>> @jesse22432
>>>> 11 days ago
>>>> Having grown up in a fairly conservative political environment, I
>>>> appreciate David Harvey's perspectives and also his fair-mindedness
>>>> and patience. I watched (to my knowledge) all of his videos in the
>>>> "Anti-Capitalist Chronicles" series. He is an excellent
>>>> communicator and masterful at applying theory to current events and
>>>> phenomena. I am glad to see he is out with a new book and a new
>>>> video. Good Health, Professor Harvey!
>>>> 11
>>>> @tinku-t9d
>>>> 9 days ago
>>>> The Most Respected Man for Me. When I face with blanks on some
>>>> Questions on Economic History. I listen to him. Even though they
>>>> were debatable.
>>>> 1
>>>> @RillyKewl
>>>> 8 days ago
>>>> I wanna listen to David Harvey explain Marx forever ✊♥👏
>>>> 1
>>>> @NineteenthandLamont
>>>> 10 days ago
>>>> Wow! Such a great. Happy 90th
>>>> 4
>>>> @farukogut4181
>>>> 10 days ago
>>>> Happy birthday David Harvey
>>>> 4
>>>> @ludviglidstrom6924
>>>> 9 days ago
>>>> The great David Harvey!
>>>> 2
>>>> @robertcox14
>>>> 6 days ago
>>>> Thank you for the Book, Professor!
>>>> @guilhermepreger3649
>>>>
>>>> *****
>>>>
>>>> *Introduction *
>>>>
>>>> Hello, I'm David Harvey and this is the story of capital. It is an
>>>> attempt to try to understand how capital works with an eye to
>>>> thinking about ways in which we might want to change it.
>>>>
>>>> I would like my readers to understand that each one of these
>>>> chapters was me trying to distil down a very important aspect of
>>>> how capital accumulates. But I don't want you to think that that
>>>> somehow or other I have told the whole story. This is in fact a
>>>> base if you like. I hope that you will take the propositions laid
>>>> out here and some of the examples and start to think about how
>>>> these play out in your daily life.
>>>>
>>>> If everybody can suddenly come to the same conception that this is
>>>> actually the daily life we're living, then they're in be in a
>>>> position to change it.
>>>>
>>>> *Preface *
>>>>
>>>> In the preface to this book, I write the following. The world is
>>>> perpetually changing. Likewise, our understanding of it is also
>>>> constantly evolving in both positive and negative ways.
>>>>
>>>> This book is one more step in telling the story of capital in a way
>>>> that people can, I hope, understand and use both personally and
>>>> politically.
>>>>
>>>> Collectively, we can indeed change this world. Even though as Marx
>>>> points out this is never under conditions of our own choosing but
>>>> the theoretical dissection of these conditions is a vital precursor
>>>> towards changing them and on that basis I offer this text in the
>>>> quest to build a more humane and ecologically sensitive alternative.
>>>>
>>>> *The Circulation of Labour Capacity and the Origin of Profit within
>>>> the circulation of capital*
>>>>
>>>> The circulation of labor capacity takes on particular relevance.
>>>> Marx defines five moments in that circulation of labor capacity.
>>>> And Marx has a very interesting way of talking about political
>>>> consciousness arising out of material practices and each one of
>>>> these moments in this circulation process defines a certain
>>>> politics. So that for example right now in New York City we are
>>>> seeing a sort of politics of consumption that we're concerned about
>>>> affordable housing and affordability. This is all on the consumer
>>>> side.
>>>>
>>>> There's not so much being done right now on the role of capital in
>>>> the production process. So by looking at this we can end up with a
>>>> very different kind of political idea of what it is might animate
>>>> people. People are animated right now by conditions in the
>>>> consumption sphere. On page 26, I start by talking about the
>>>> circulation of labor capacity and its relationship to the origin of
>>>> profit.
>>>>
>>>> For capital to exist, there has to be a labor force that had no
>>>> option but to offer its capacity to labor to capitalists in order
>>>> to survive.
>>>>
>>>> The rise of industrial capital entailed the creation of a
>>>> distinctive mode of circulation of labor capacity that integrates
>>>> with and supports the requirements of capital accumulation.
>>>>
>>>> These two circulation processes of capital and of labor capacity
>>>> collide to produce value and surplus value that is profit in
>>>> commodity form.
>>>>
>>>> The emergence of capital out of the circulation of money is the
>>>> original moment for capital. This emergence rests, however, on the
>>>> ability of the capitalist to find upon the market a commodity
>>>> capable of creating more value than it itself has.
>>>>
>>>> That commodity is labor power. The capacity to labor. This is a
>>>> critical point both historically and theoretically. Labor power is
>>>> the only commodity that can bridge the contradiction between the
>>>> rule that all commodities should exchange at their value while
>>>> producing the surplus value that sustains profit on a continuous basis.
>>>>
>>>> Labor power says Marx is the form-giving fire out of which capital
>>>> is forged through surplus value production. The procurement of
>>>> surplus value for profit is the be all and end all of the
>>>> capitalist ambition.
>>>>
>>>> The capitalist merely captures and appropriates the surplus value
>>>> that labor produces.
>>>>
>>>> From a materialist standpoint, it is the laborer who produces the
>>>> industrial capitalist. Or as Marx prefers to put it, capital is
>>>> dead labor which vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor
>>>> and lives the more the more labor it sucks.
>>>>
>>>> The ongoing struggles over the length of the working day, what Marx
>>>> calls absolute surface value, cannot be resolved by appeal to
>>>> bourgeois property rights or law. Class struggle ensues.
>>>>
>>>> The struggle over the appropriation of the laborers' time litters
>>>> the history of capital accumulation.
>>>>
>>>> *Technological Dynamism and the Productivity of Labour *
>>>>
>>>> When Marx talks about the labor process, he puts a lot of emphasis
>>>> on what he calls the coercive laws of competition.
>>>>
>>>> And this arises out of the relative surplus value in the following
>>>> sense that the capitalist that has the superior technology gets an
>>>> excess profit and can therefore drive out those on with inferior
>>>> technologies. But the result of that coercive law is that the
>>>> capitalist ends up employing fewer and fewer laborers.
>>>>
>>>> Because labor is becoming so productive that what the sort of
>>>> productivity that was there in the 18th century, has no comparison
>>>> whatsoever to the productivity of labor power now.
>>>>
>>>> And so when we say, ‘how is wage repression mobilized,’ it's
>>>> individual capitalists competing with each other for profit, who
>>>> lower the wages of the workers. And the result is this wage
>>>> repression. And so we've seen a lot of that wage repression coming
>>>> through the exercise of the coercive laws of competition between
>>>> individual capitalists since about 1970 onwards.
>>>>
>>>> Relative surplus value rises because more efficient producers can
>>>> sell commodities at their value but produce at lower cost than the
>>>> social average. These more efficient producers realize an extra profit.
>>>>
>>>> *Modern industry *
>>>>
>>>> Marx in Capital never views or treats the existing form of a
>>>> production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is
>>>> therefore revolutionary. Whereas all earlier modes of production
>>>> were essentially conservative, the impacts of this permanent
>>>> revolutionizing of production systems on the laborer are contradictory.
>>>>
>>>> The old system of division of labor is thrown overboard by
>>>> machinery and the lifelong specialty of handling the same tool now
>>>> becomes a lifelong specialty of serving the same machine, thus
>>>> converting workers into living appendages of the machine. Well, the
>>>> big leap came with the rise of the factory system.
>>>>
>>>> The peripheralisation of new divisions of labor and skill
>>>> definition has continued to accelerate. Whereas workers in the
>>>> 1960s could look forward to employment over a lifetime, the
>>>> acceleration of technological innovation now entails retaining and
>>>> reskilling several times over in a worst in a working time.
>>>>
>>>> The history of labor demand would suggest that capital cultivates
>>>> both kinds of labor with a flexible, educated, and adaptable,
>>>> generally achieving a more adequate standard of living than those
>>>> condemned to the dull, unimaginative, and badly reimunerated forms
>>>> of industrial labor typical of the factory system. Labor of the
>>>> latter sort, with some obvious exceptions such as caring functions
>>>> for the elderly, is particularly vulnerable to displacement by
>>>> automation and artificial intelligence.
>>>>
>>>> *Extractivism and the Metabolic Relation to Nature *
>>>>
>>>> Marx looks at nature as a vast repository of potentially use values
>>>> for production. So extractivism is Marx's way of saying there's
>>>> something there that initially should be a free good. But by the
>>>> time the capitalists have got taken ownership of it they can turn
>>>> it into a site for rent extraction and property enhancement. And so
>>>> ownership of those sites is about owning the extractive
>>>> possibilities. And the kind of economy that results – an
>>>> extractivist economy – where they don't make anything or do
>>>> anything other than just simply take money and appropriate money
>>>> for the use of the resources which lie embedded in the land. Which
>>>> in a sense should be free goods available to everyone.
>>>>
>>>> All production, says Marx, is appropriation of nature on the part
>>>> of an individual within and through the specific form of society.
>>>>
>>>> This is Marx's first step towards a holistic dialectical
>>>> interpretation of the relation to nature. The relation to nature is
>>>> deemed metabolic. This refers to a relation between two or more
>>>> elements or moments that are so intertwined that one element cannot
>>>> exist independently of the other. Human labor in this sense we are
>>>> now considering it is defined by its metabolic role in transforming
>>>> elements of nature into useful products to support human life. The
>>>> labor theory of value rests on this metabolic relation.
>>>>
>>>> Unfortunately, industrial capital disturbs the metabolic relation
>>>> between man and the earth. It prevents the return to the soil of
>>>> its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and
>>>> clothing. Hence, it hinders the operation of the eternal natural
>>>> condition for the lasting fertility of the soil. The destructive
>>>> consequences are everywhere apparent in capital.
>>>>
>>>> Marx puts it this way: capitalist agriculture is a process in the
>>>> art not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil. The
>>>> more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background
>>>> of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more
>>>> rapid is the process of destruction.
>>>>
>>>> Capitalist production therefore only develops the techniques and
>>>> degrees of combination of the social process of production by
>>>> simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth, the
>>>> soil and the worker.
>>>>
>>>> *The Troublesome Case of Fictitious Capital *
>>>>
>>>> Fictitious capital is something that actually suffuses the whole
>>>> system of capital accumulation that we're talking about. In a way,
>>>> what the capitalist does is to take money capital use it to create
>>>> a profit and in that process it actually there's a moment where
>>>> everything is speculative. everything.
>>>>
>>>> Nobody really knows whether you're going to make a profit.
>>>>
>>>> You go into the market and you try to sell something and you maybe
>>>> you can't sell it. So maybe you can't get it. But if you manage to
>>>> get it, then the profit is real. But that moment where nobody knows
>>>> whether it can be sold or not is a moment where capital is in a
>>>> what Marx calls a fictitious state. We hope we will make it. We
>>>> hope that the labor we employed and the reason production we've
>>>> assembled will be able to produce a commodity which yield will
>>>> yield us a profit. But it might not. And so there's constantly a
>>>> speculative angle and it's always there.
>>>>
>>>> But what happens in contemporary world is the speculative element
>>>> becomes stronger and stronger and stronger – to the point where now
>>>> the speculations which are going on are very often far more
>>>> money-grubbing and -minding than the actual production processes.
>>>> And so the share of manufacturing in US economy is going down and
>>>> down and down. The share of of labor in manufacturing is going down
>>>> and down. And the share of stock market appreciations goes up and
>>>> up and up. So we have turned ourselves more and more into a
>>>> fictitious economy. In the Grundrisse, Marx suggests that the germ
>>>> of capital's distinctive credit system was present at the birth of
>>>> capital's becoming.
>>>>
>>>> But debt as a claim on future labor explains the inner relation
>>>> that depicts an accumulation of capital as an accumulation of
>>>> debts. This takes us back to the role of credit in squaring the
>>>> circle between the production and realization of surplus value in
>>>> such a way as to facilitate the spiral form of endless
>>>> accumulation. The credit system may have originated as a faithful
>>>> servant, but it now has become a wayward master.
>>>>
>>>> The exponential expansion of interest-bearing capital over the last
>>>> three decades points to the simple fact that capital has reached
>>>> its Ponzi scale stage. [PB defn: wherein one is so indebted as to
>>>> require new loans merely in order to pay the interest on past debt]
>>>>
>>>> An increasingly complex and sophisticated credit system and an
>>>> irrepressible circulation of more and more interest-bearing capital
>>>> is however the Pandora's Box that capital, with force, must open if
>>>> it is survive and grow without limit.
>>>>
>>>> Monied capitalists do not only lend to industrial capitalists to
>>>> produce a surplus value. They're equally drawn to lend to invest in
>>>> government debt, mortgages, stocks and shares, land and property,
>>>> rents, commodity futures, consumer credit card debt, or whatever.
>>>>
>>>> These other forms of investment are collectively categorized as
>>>> ‘fictitious’ forms of capital. Money capitalists are indifferent as
>>>> to who they lend to and equally indifferent to the ultimate source
>>>> of the revenue stream which yields the interest payments on the
>>>> money they lend out.
>>>>
>>>> The danger then lurks that lending will not be for purposes of
>>>> surplus value production but becomes solely oriented to the
>>>> appropriation of value.
>>>>
>>>> All connection with capital's actual process of valorization is
>>>> lost right down to the last trace confirming the notion that
>>>> capital automatically valorizes itself.
>>>>
>>>> Everything appears in duplicate and triplicate and it is
>>>> transformed into a mere phantom of the mind such that an even an
>>>> accumulation of debts can appear as an accumulation of capital.
>>>>
>>>> As Marx succinctly put it, “financiers as the primary dealers in
>>>> fictitious capital fuse the charming personas of swindlers and
>>>> prophets.”
>>>>
>>>> Fictitious capital is, as titles of ownership, claims to future
>>>> labor, paper duplicates of the real capital, profits and losses and
>>>> also the concentration of these property titles. By the nature of
>>>> the case, more and more the result of gambling, which now appears
>>>> in place of labor as the original source of capital ownership as
>>>> well as taking the place of the direct use of force.
>>>>
>>>> *The State-Finance Nexus and The Geopolitics of Capital *
>>>>
>>>> Marx put a great deal of emphasis on inter-capitalist competition
>>>> when he was talking about the coercive laws of competition. But one
>>>> of the things that I emphasize is that it is also about competition
>>>> between states. If you say to yourself, ‘where does technological
>>>> change come from?,’ the amount of technological change that has
>>>> arisen out of the armament industry is very high and that,
>>>> therefore, it is not only inter-capitalist competition but it's
>>>> inter--state competition which starts to be important. And you can
>>>> say even something like the internet was something that came out of
>>>> the military apparatus. So that a lot of the theory that Marx built
>>>> about the results of the coercive laws of competition between
>>>> industrial capitals, actually have to be applied also to state
>>>> apparatuses which are organizing military things.
>>>>
>>>> The interplay between the capitalist and territorial logics of
>>>> power is a defining feature of modern geopolitics.
>>>>
>>>> Marx noted that the concept of national wealth creeps into the work
>>>> of the economist and its competition over that national wealth
>>>> becomes predominant. But under the regime of competing ethnic
>>>> nationalisms, the production of wealth by capital is primarily put
>>>> to work to serve national interests rather than those of capital alone.
>>>>
>>>> These two logics are not merely competing forces, but ones that are
>>>> deeply intertwined, influencing how states navigate global and
>>>> domestic challenges.
>>>>
>>>> The dual role of the state finance nexus becomes particularly
>>>> evident during crisis. The state as both an enabler and a mediator
>>>> of accumulation occupies a central political position in capital
>>>> social formation. However, its dual logics of power, capitalist
>>>> power and territorial power, create tensions that shape the
>>>> trajectory of global and domestic politics.
>>>>
>>>> *Conclusion*
>>>>
>>>> So, in drawing this to a conclusion, we can say the story of
>>>> capital as here presented, points to three prominent contradictions
>>>> that threaten the future of endless capital accumulation. These
>>>> contradictions cry out to be addressed and are therefore potential
>>>> fodder for anti-capitalist struggles.
>>>>
>>>> The first of these begins with the past 40 years of wage repression
>>>> enforced through inter-capitalist and inter-state competition.
>>>>
>>>> The result is widespread alienation at the bottom of the income
>>>> pyramid. It will take a mass movement of the alienated and
>>>> dispossessed and some concrete results of specific struggles to
>>>> awaken the hope and prospect for a better collective future.
>>>>
>>>> To make matters worse, artificial intelligence threatens to reduce
>>>> labor demand substantially well into the future. Wage repression is
>>>> more likely to increase than to decline in coming years without a
>>>> vigorous campaign against it.
>>>>
>>>> The second issue is the unbelievable concentration of monetized
>>>> wealth and power with all its political and economic consequences.
>>>> The top 500 billionaires, Bloomberg tells us, now control $9.8
>>>> trillion.
>>>>
>>>> This valuation is predicated on a massive increase in the
>>>> circulation of fictitious capitals propped up by Ponzi financing
>>>> and outlandish increases in asset values, for example, property in
>>>> particular.
>>>>
>>>> Finally, no one can doubt that an existing crisis of our metabolic
>>>> relation to nature is already upon us. The threats of famine and
>>>> the pestilence, droughts, firestorms and floods, heat waves and ice
>>>> storms, earthquakes and tsunamis, ecological collapses and
>>>> pandemics have always been with us, but their intensity and
>>>> frequency have ratcheted up. And is now systemwide.
>>>>
>>>> The scale is now biblical rather than manageable. Trump's call to
>>>> drill, baby, drill results in burn, baby, burn in Los Angeles. The
>>>> rectification of our terribly unbalanced metabolic relation to
>>>> nature will take massive adjustments in both production and
>>>> consumption and will therefore constitute a threat to further
>>>> unbridled capital accumulation.
>>>>
>>>> Alliances in search of alternatives are forming, and the socialist
>>>> perspective has much to offer, because nothing short of total
>>>> revolutions will address our metabolic relation to nature, our
>>>> addiction to its enormous centralized power of Ponzi financing and
>>>> fictitious capital circulation, along with the long-standing
>>>> alienation, and the grim cruelty of ever more savage wage repression.
>>>>
>>>> So, here am I. Yes, it's just been my 90th birthday. Looking back
>>>> on my career as a geographer, interested in explaining with a
>>>> little help from Marx how urbanization and uneven development work,
>>>> find myself obliged to some extraordinary scholars and to people,
>>>> events and political currents that open doors to new ways of
>>>> thinking, hopefully more adequate to confront the central
>>>> contradictions of our times.
>>>>
>>>> It is however one thing to open doors but quite another to pass
>>>> through to the on mass to the other side to explore what might
>>>> exist. The American empire that has sheltered capital for so long
>>>> is starting to crack. This is a moment of opportunity as well as of
>>>> peril. A little bit of optimism of the intellect is called for if
>>>> only to jumpstart the optimism of the will. And I hope this book
>>>> will inspire you to participate in that process.
>>>>
>>>> ***
>>>>
>>>> *3 Nov 2024 Anti-Capitalist Chronicles with David Harvey*
>>>> [S6 E04]
>>>>
>>>> *Revolt and Recession: The Global Crisis of Higher Education and Work*
>>>>
>>>> David Harvey reflects on recent protests in Bangladesh as a "canary
>>>> in the coal mine" for growing global discontent over unequal job
>>>> opportunities and socioeconomic divides. He explores parallels
>>>> between the unrest in Bangladesh, Iran, and student movements of
>>>> the 1960s, highlighting the role of higher education and the
>>>> precarious job market in fueling frustration.
>>>>
>>>> Harvey also delves into the potential impact of automation,
>>>> artificial intelligence, and the rise of adjunct teaching, warning
>>>> of a future where economic instability could provoke widespread
>>>> discontent among educated but underemployed populations.
>>>>
>>>> Stay connected with the latest news from Politics in Motion. Join
>>>> our mailing list today: https://www.politicsinmotion.org David
>>>> Harvey's Anti-Capitalist Chronicles is co-produced by Politics in
>>>> Motion. Politics In Motion is a nonprofit organization founded in
>>>> May 2023 by Prof. David Harvey and Prof. Miguel Robles-Durán, along
>>>> with Dr. Chris Caruso, instructional technologist, and noted writer
>>>> and art curator Laura Raicovich. Our anti-capitalist media platform
>>>> offers piercing insights and thought-provoking analyses on
>>>> political, social, spatial, cultural, environmental and economic
>>>> issues through a range of engaging mediums, including YouTube
>>>> streams, podcasts, and live events. If you would like to support
>>>> this project and see more of Prof. Harvey, visit us at: /
>>>> politicsinmotion
>>>>
>>>> Welcome back to /The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles,/which is produced
>>>> by /Politics in Motion./
>>>>
>>>> Now, there are certain events that happen internationally which I
>>>> guess the only way I can talk about them is that they're like a
>>>> sort of canary in the coal mine event. That is, they seem to
>>>> suggest that there may be a problem somewhere, and we don't know
>>>> exactly what it is or how broad it is, but it serves as a warning:
>>>> you better be alert and watch out soon.
>>>>
>>>> The event that I'm thinking of recently was the events in
>>>> Bangladesh. As you may know, in Bangladesh, there were riots and
>>>> discontent. The immediate focus of the riots was, interestingly, a
>>>> problem of access to job opportunities. It turned out that the
>>>> ruling class, or caste as it is sometimes talked about, had set up
>>>> a system whereby the families that were most engaged in the
>>>> independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan—during the big struggle
>>>> that went on at that time in the formation of the state—had
>>>> privileged access to primary job opportunities. This was
>>>> particularly evident in the state sector but also extended beyond
>>>> to other institutions.
>>>>
>>>> In other words, Bangladesh had a job market divided between those
>>>> who came from privileged families—not privileged by education or
>>>> merit, but by their role in the independence movement—and those who
>>>> did not. As a result, a large number of people were either
>>>> unemployed or underemployed in inferior jobs. There was no
>>>> meritocracy. This system essentially created a caste-like structure
>>>> for the ruling class in Bangladesh. The students revolted against
>>>> it, leading to unrest, and some political figures even had to leave
>>>> the country.
>>>>
>>>> Why do I think of this as a canary in the coal mine? Because it was
>>>> a student movement. Historically, strong student movements have
>>>> preceded significant social change. A few years before, there was a
>>>> very strong student movement in Iran, which was suppressed and led
>>>> to the execution of certain leading figures. Iran, as I argue, is a
>>>> caste society, where preserving the ruling caste takes absolute
>>>> priority. However, there was still a powerful student movement
>>>> against the system.
>>>>
>>>> This led me to think about the history of student movements and
>>>> their significance. The last time student movements were truly
>>>> influential in Western societies was during the 1960s in the United
>>>> States and Europe. After World War II, there was a vast expansion
>>>> of higher education and an educated labor force. By the end of the
>>>> 1960s, this educated labor force struggled to find job
>>>> opportunities compatible with their education. This led to
>>>> dissatisfaction and movements such as the Free Speech Movement in
>>>> Berkeley, as well as broader discussions about capitalism,
>>>> corporate power, and militarization.
>>>>
>>>> A similar situation is emerging today. Highly educated individuals
>>>> are finding themselves without meaningful job opportunities. In
>>>> academia, for example, job structures have changed. In the 1960s,
>>>> most academics did their own teaching. Over time, the proportion of
>>>> adjunct teaching has steadily increased, leading to a stark divide
>>>> between tenured professors and precariously employed adjunct
>>>> instructors. Many highly qualified academics are in low-paying,
>>>> unstable positions, teaching multiple classes just to make ends meet.
>>>>
>>>> This pattern is not limited to academia. Job structures in finance
>>>> and other industries are also under pressure due to automation and
>>>> artificial intelligence. As these industries shrink or change, we
>>>> are seeing a growing class of overqualified but underemployed
>>>> individuals. More and more people with higher education degrees are
>>>> becoming Uber drivers or Amazon delivery workers. This is a
>>>> dangerous situation. When a large, educated segment of the
>>>> population feels alienated and lacks job opportunities, social
>>>> unrest is likely to follow.
>>>>
>>>> I believe we are on the verge of a global student movement similar
>>>> to that of the 1960s. The Bangladesh example serves as an early
>>>> warning sign. It highlights the growing incompatibility between
>>>> higher education and the job market. Furthermore, education itself
>>>> is becoming increasingly hierarchical. STEM fields (Science,
>>>> Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) tend to offer better
>>>> financial prospects, while degrees in humanities and social
>>>> sciences often lead to lower-paying jobs. This trend is reshaping
>>>> the nature of education, making it more technocratic and less
>>>> focused on broader intellectual development.
>>>>
>>>> At the same time, artificial intelligence is already impacting job
>>>> hiring. If we compare the job market of the 1980s to today, we can
>>>> see that there was once an expansion of opportunities for those
>>>> with higher education. However, in the last five years, this
>>>> category of employment has been shrinking. More and more people
>>>> with advanced degrees find themselves in low-wage, insecure jobs.
>>>> This is creating a growing sense of discontent, particularly in
>>>> metropolitan areas where the workforce is more educated. If this
>>>> continues, we could see a new wave of social unrest, similar to the
>>>> late 1960s.
>>>>
>>>> One proposed solution is Universal Basic Income (UBI). However, I
>>>> am skeptical of this approach. If you provide a basic income,
>>>> capitalists will likely respond by raising prices on consumer
>>>> goods, rent, and other essentials, negating the benefits of UBI.
>>>> Instead, we need to create meaningful, well-paying jobs that match
>>>> people's education and skills.
>>>>
>>>> One area that urgently needs investment is the care sector. With
>>>> aging populations, there is a growing demand for long-term care.
>>>> However, wages in this field are low, and the industry is often
>>>> plagued by scandals and exploitation. Instead of relying on UBI, we
>>>> should focus on raising wages and improving conditions in essential
>>>> sectors like healthcare and social services.
>>>>
>>>> The fundamental question is: How do we create job structures that
>>>> align with education and societal needs? Without addressing this,
>>>> we risk severe economic instability. More and more highly educated
>>>> individuals will find themselves unable to secure meaningful
>>>> employment, leading to widespread alienation and potential upheaval.
>>>>
>>>> China presents an interesting case study. The country has
>>>> significantly expanded its higher education system, producing a
>>>> highly educated workforce. However, even in China, educated workers
>>>> are struggling to find adequate employment. This has led to signs
>>>> of unrest. President Xi Jinping's response was to tell young people
>>>> to "eat bitterness," essentially asking them to endure hardships.
>>>> But this does not address the underlying issue. If China, with its
>>>> centralized planning and strong state intervention, is struggling
>>>> with this problem, we should take it as a serious warning for the
>>>> rest of the world.
>>>>
>>>> In conclusion, these global trends suggest that we may be heading
>>>> toward a period of significant social and economic unrest. The
>>>> Bangladesh student movement is just one of many early warning
>>>> signs. If we do not address the disconnect between education and
>>>> job opportunities, we could see a global wave of discontent similar
>>>> to the 1960s. The rise of artificial intelligence and automation
>>>> only adds urgency to this issue. If handled poorly, these
>>>> technological advancements will exacerbate economic inequality
>>>> rather than alleviate it. The time to act is now, before the
>>>> situation escalates beyond control.
>>>>
>>>> On 2022/12/19 12:33, Patrick Bond wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Two excellent podcasts this week, the first, a discussion with
>>>>> Rick Wolff about capitalist contradictions and crises; the other
>>>>> touching on how Marxists are oppressed within Western academia and
>>>>> mainstream political commentary:
>>>>>
>>>>> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JllV04jm0tY
>>>>> * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzKzTaVCdQU
>>>>>
>>>>> On 8/7/2022 5:59 PM, Patrick Bond wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> NationBuilder
>>>>>> Enjoy Anti-Capitalist Chronicles season 4
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Friend -- **
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Mixing timely analysis of capitalism’s biggest trends and
>>>>>> timeless insights into capitalism’s function, David Harvey is
>>>>>> bringing you a whole new season of Anti-Capitalist Chronicles.
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/davidharveyacc?e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=2>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> While the Marxist geographer takes a brief summer hiatus, catch
>>>>>> up on David Harvey’s Anti-Capitalist Chronicles Season 4 to learn
>>>>>> from his expertise
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_episode_list_s4?e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=3>on
>>>>>> modern events (war, shifting economic power and politics) as well
>>>>>> as some ever-relevant observations of the way capitalism controls
>>>>>> our world.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_season4_promo?e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=4>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> *Technology*
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Technology has become the largest industry in the world.
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/r?u=GQ96LxW7tJscudkL8mlwNzVEKXk7dMDJzwJlfbbiiRZZVFXdWp-_r4d9Lcc1ZnMBkI79-8Q6cXJ9UWePVodRX_PAthEWXHRh_DvdbzLaIAiN1QoDHxUvdYUuKd74zuv5&e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=5>Prof
>>>>>> Harvey has dedicated a few of this season’s episodes to the role
>>>>>> of technology in today’s economy
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/r?u=GQ96LxW7tJscudkL8mlwNzVEKXk7dMDJzwJlfbbiiRYbKBdNah84oTwiZoK2I_h9NA9Vd0xZ3vAsGDxlXevCTv7VnvOvg0AeQy-EKB8wIT0arcB0oNNmAPGumVfAGEnZ&e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=6>,
>>>>>> covering topics such as the military, concealed exploitative
>>>>>> practices, monetization of access
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/r?u=GQ96LxW7tJscudkL8mlwNzVEKXk7dMDJzwJlfbbiiRbZ7tG5UwjU9W1mIsfSlJgOcqJMAvYUYN5E0NUO54lUOYmbJuBZZfWzPnv5Zg4RmIMtXXexy-FgToUJjSIaA4Z3&e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=7>and
>>>>>> artificial intelligence. Explore with Harvey today’s forms of
>>>>>> competition and technology’s production that shapes our lives for
>>>>>> the sake of profit.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> /“Innovation is not designed to create happiness. It's designed a
>>>>>> lot of the time to facilitate one's needs and desires, to
>>>>>> stimulate desire and all of those kinds of things. It's certainly
>>>>>> about doing all of that, but it's not about making the world
>>>>>> better for people. And it's not about improving their lives in
>>>>>> any way. It's about trying to actually create a world in which
>>>>>> more profit is to be had”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> /Therein lies the central contradiction of capitalism
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_capitals_double_consciousness?e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=8>:
>>>>>> capital is great at creating new products, ideas, possibilities,
>>>>>> and lifestyles, but it simultaneously produces alienation.
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/r?u=GQ96LxW7tJscudkL8mlwNzVEKXk7dMDJzwJlfbbiiRbrosIWUyKCLlbHdWHuPPJb0Qapt7P87wEACRWjCvwRcG_dM1iqSLhLL-LTpXzrNXc-o9D08nx9r3-GJTaU2H7B&e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=9>It
>>>>>> is no wonder that there is a deep dissatisfaction with our society.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> *Military*
>>>>>>
>>>>>> /"The one sector of government that doesn’t experience austerity
>>>>>> is the military budget.”
>>>>>> /Prof. Harvey looks at the role of military expenditures in
>>>>>> contemporary capitalism
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_war_who_benefits_from_it?e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=10>in
>>>>>> the US and how it affects the rest of the world- including the
>>>>>> money that falls into the hands of weapons manufacturers.
>>>>>> Unfortunately, geopolitical conflicts escalate into war, both
>>>>>> historically and today with the ongoing crisis in Ukraine
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/r?u=GQ96LxW7tJscudkL8mlwNzVEKXk7dMDJzwJlfbbiiRbE3wm6xQatSR_ca9_e_FItn07k6VIHnkZldyF-JUGDUdcY9FRqdSa-ngSpGc7xzAJNonDT05bboqQAebL30x4o&e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=11>.
>>>>>> Harvey looks at NATO’s role in escalating this crisis
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/r?u=GQ96LxW7tJscudkL8mlwNzVEKXk7dMDJzwJlfbbiiRbpQUVU4vE0ZI2MQDoMbk7j3ydR5HhXSGxFEg31l5vmBO63ehTTCSWEHFF-UVFKD56OJF7j_xzAOJCeE4_SWv6m&e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=12>.
>>>>>> Mutually assured destruction will continue to be a threat until
>>>>>> the West and NATO decide to de-escalate, demilitarize, and
>>>>>> negotiate
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_path_dependency_ukraine_nuclear_war?e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=13>rather
>>>>>> than to continually operate offensively.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> /“To what degree is competition between states somehow rather
>>>>>> related, tightly related, to the competition between capitalists?”/
>>>>>>
>>>>>> *Harvey’s Keys*
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In a number of episodes this season, Harvey explains key concepts
>>>>>> to understanding capitalism such as the coercive laws of
>>>>>> competition
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/r?u=GQ96LxW7tJscudkL8mlwNzVEKXk7dMDJzwJlfbbiiRan-y722GggKy8F9OQoQvcZbZKQnJUZkgqYF3e4JEupkcp2zFzBz6Lbty0lKyWCPeGo6YPV6MxUyKtM1JaRmuMe&e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=14>that
>>>>>> control capitalists, how inflation
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/r?u=GQ96LxW7tJscudkL8mlwNzVEKXk7dMDJzwJlfbbiiRaG41hBJV8pxgm1k1RoA49opYuN8tKi56P0625k_rUL7UcnqXcbC8i2_THZC9K88nce1mO8H7oe8T6ixh_8OjNX&e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=15>&
>>>>>> inequality
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/r?u=GQ96LxW7tJscudkL8mlwNzVEKXk7dMDJzwJlfbbiiRbTOREJKq3VBTJQJipSlS9D7nrUHH8Zq0p7KaVS4RpmHQKkfOLCTUmn2Sbc9pKdHqJbIPmh4GiqUV4uFmDWXEaEi4gSzcGqpiHczTk7KcDePw&e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=16>are
>>>>>> used to undercut the working class
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/r?u=GQ96LxW7tJscudkL8mlwNzVEKXk7dMDJzwJlfbbiiRbeSLwQdJ-3JxLlfXZjib3YXgZ0SLg6KkW87LRBXgPkvtHxzEb5gNjKeBwaSooQcke_JrzZwLkOQiCyYR-YCBYL&e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=17>and
>>>>>> the changing geography
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_shifts_in_world_hegemony?e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=18>of
>>>>>> economic power
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/r?u=GQ96LxW7tJscudkL8mlwNzVEKXk7dMDJzwJlfbbiiRZpxm8j2Hub2MocuCc2hE6sWCspVny0bV1ZKzOh2Kr94BUPyPoG2t__isHNei4srMBVSMY4HPFq0C0IExbTjT1Z&e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=19>.
>>>>>> Prof Harvey makes sure to address ongoing crises and
>>>>>> conversations
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_evolution_of_capitalism?e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=20>while
>>>>>> keeping an eye on the future and saying we need a better,
>>>>>> alternative system
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_freedom_necessity_anticapitalism?e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=21>.
>>>>>> We need to avoid further climate catastrophe
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/r?u=GQ96LxW7tJscudkL8mlwNzVEKXk7dMDJzwJlfbbiiRbTOREJKq3VBTJQJipSlS9D7nrUHH8Zq0p7KaVS4RpmHQKkfOLCTUmn2Sbc9pKdHqJbIPmh4GiqUV4uFmDWXEaEi4gSzcGqpiHczTk7KcDePw&e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=22>.
>>>>>> Socialism can allow more free time for workers
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/r?u=GQ96LxW7tJscudkL8mlwNzVEKXk7dMDJzwJlfbbiiRa82RiphFTY_33s0oVfWqHYb2-f60CMsgSgiB_MAJIYYVyuAM5rzE3c-RphZFrJoWtnTYkBVVavoT8YBhJpdELH&e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=23>.
>>>>>> We find hopeful changes
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_freedom_necessity_anticapitalism?e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=24>in
>>>>>> the political landscape of various countries: Colombia, Peru,
>>>>>> Brazil and France.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There is light shining through the cracks of capitalism.
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/r?u=GQ96LxW7tJscudkL8mlwNzVEKXk7dMDJzwJlfbbiiRaRBcXzYqOUL_UELW9oyKyGCpwq7GUT5zfjGUvPGJOoabnTkKu7OgMXm8laTrbsMrcE_fMF8hLYCoptd2-aiYvm&e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=25>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Tune into *David Harvey’s Anti-Capitalist Chronicles Season 4*
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_episode_list_s4?e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=26>for
>>>>>> all of the famous Marxist geographer’s analysis and insights on
>>>>>> this system.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> And as always, we’re grateful to have such an active, engaged
>>>>>> audience with us. Join us in promoting lessons like these by
>>>>>> sharing our work or *learning about the many ways you can donate
>>>>>> to d@w.*
>>>>>> <https://www.democracyatwork.info/donate?e=54c279921da3a9d39b07f1212a909cfe&utm_source=democracyatwork&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nd_acc_season4&n=27>
>>>>>> Whatever way you support us, thank you for partnering with us.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In solidarity,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> *Thed@w Team*
>>>>>>
>>>>>> ("If money is the butterfly form of capital and commodities are
>>>>>> the caterpillar form then production is the chrysalis form where
>>>>>> value and surplus value are incubated." The first talk here is
>>>>>> very good on how 'productive' labour - for value-creation under
>>>>>> capitalism - is core to the mode of production.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This course has excellent Q&A after he reads the lecture -
>>>>>> which is the text below plus his side commentary.)
>>>>>>
>>>>>> http://davidharvey.org/2022/02/the-abc-of-contemporary-capital-session-1/*
>>>>>> *
>>>>>>
>>>>>> *THE ABC OF CAPITAL: A TEXTBOOK
>>>>>> *
>>>>>>
>>>>>> *DAVID HARVEY
>>>>>> *
>>>>>>
>>>>>> *SESSION I
>>>>>> *
>>>>>>
>>>>>> *THE MISSION*
>>>>>>
>>>>>> **THE EXACT DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPT OF CAPITAL IS
>>>>>> NECESSARY SINCE IT IS THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPT OF MODERN
>>>>>> ECONOMICS, JUST AS CAPITAL ITSELF IS THE FOUNDATION OF
>>>>>> BOURGEOIS SOCIETY. THE SHARP FORMULATION OF THE
>>>>>> PRESUPPOSITIONS OF THE (CAPITAL) RELATION MUST BRING OUT ALL
>>>>>> THE CONTRADICTIONS OF BOURGEOIS PRODUCTION, AS WELL AS THE
>>>>>> BOUNDARY WHERE IT DRIVES BEYOND ITSELF
>>>>>>
>>>>>> KARL MARX: /THE GRUNDRISSE /(1857-8) *
>>>>>> *
>>>>>>
>>>>>> *THE CONTEXT *
>>>>>>
>>>>>> THERE HAVE STARTED INTO LIFE INDUSTRIAL AND SCIENTIFIC
>>>>>> FORCES, WHICH NO EPOCH OF THE FORMER HUMAN HISTORY HAD EVER
>>>>>> SUSPECTED. ON THE OTHER HAND, THERE EXIST SYMPTOMS OF DECAY,
>>>>>> FAR SURPASSING THE HORRORS RECORDED OF THE LATTER TIMES OF
>>>>>> THE ROMAN EMPIRE. IN OUR DAYS, EVERYTHING SEEMS PREGNANT WITH
>>>>>> ITS CONTRARY: MACHINERY, GIFTED WITH THE WONDERFUL POWER OF
>>>>>> SHORTENING AND FRUCTIFYING HUMAN LABOUR, WE BEHOLD STARVING
>>>>>> AND OVERWORKING IT; THE NEWFANGLED SOURCES OF WEALTH, BY SOME
>>>>>> STRANGE WEIRD SPELL, ARE TURNED INTO SOURCES OF WANT; THE
>>>>>> VICTORIES OF ART SEEM BOUGHT BY THE LOSS OF CHARACTER. AT THE
>>>>>> SAME PACE THAT MANKIND MASTERS NATURE, MAN SEEMS TO BECOME
>>>>>> ENSLAVED TO OTHER MEN OR TO HIS OWN INFAMY. EVEN THE PURE
>>>>>> LIGHT OF SCIENCE SEEMS UNABLE TO SHINE BUT ON THE DARK
>>>>>> BACKGROUND OF IGNORANCE. ALL OUR INVENTION AND PROGRESS SEEM
>>>>>> TO RESULT IN ENDOWING MATERIAL FORCES WITH INTELLECTUAL LIFE,
>>>>>> AND IN STULTIFYING HUMAN LIFE INTO A MATERIAL FORCE.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> KARL MARX: /SPEECH AT ANNIVERSARY OF THE PEOPLE’S PAPER.
>>>>>> (1856) /*PROLOGUE PROLOGUE A MAP OF THE INVESTIGATIVE TERRAIN *
>>>>>>
>>>>>> ***
>>>>>>
>>>>>> If the mission is to construct an adequate representation of
>>>>>> capital, replete with all of its contradictions, then an
>>>>>> elaborate theory must be constructed that captures how capital
>>>>>> works and what it does on the ground. This entails a certain
>>>>>> strategy of enquiry, communication and presentation. In the
>>>>>> absence of the controlled experimental methods available to the
>>>>>> natural sciences, we have to rely upon the powers of abstraction
>>>>>> and theory construction to accomplish this mission. Historical
>>>>>> materialism is, as some doctors like to say about medicine, a
>>>>>> science with a sample size of one (i.e. the. historical geography
>>>>>> of capital). Since the very mention of theory intimidates many
>>>>>> readers and the necessity of working with abstractions is
>>>>>> problematic, (the claim “it is too abstract’ ends many
>>>>>> conversations) I begin with simplified and, I hope, easily
>>>>>> graspable pictures of what capital looks like as a working
>>>>>> totality. This enables me to set up at the very outset a sense of
>>>>>> how the elements or “moments” (as Marx prefers to call them) of
>>>>>> the capitalist economic system, such as production, labour,
>>>>>> wages, profit, consumption, exchange, realization and
>>>>>> distribution hang together within the totality of what capital is
>>>>>> all about. Marx prefers the language of “moments” in order to
>>>>>> capture the transitoriness of everything that happens within the
>>>>>> totality.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Conventional economics typically conceptualizes capital as a
>>>>>> thing-like factor of production that capitalists use, when
>>>>>> combined with land and labour, to make another thing that can be
>>>>>> sold for a profit. Marx, on the other hand, defines capital as a
>>>>>> process of circulation which, at various “moments”, takes on
>>>>>> different material forms (such as money, commodities, production
>>>>>> processes, and the like). Marx’s emphasis is upon the processes
>>>>>> and the moments rather than on the things. The process-thing
>>>>>> distinction will frequently return to animate the analysis in
>>>>>> what follows. We live our lives as a process but the historical
>>>>>> record and the state registers and depicts us as things.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> While the idea of totality undoubtedly derives from Hegel, Marx
>>>>>> re-works it and revolutionizes it (as he does with almost
>>>>>> everything else taken from Hegel). For Marx the totality is an
>>>>>> ever-changing network of historically specific social practices
>>>>>> and relations built and evolving, in this case, through human
>>>>>> action. This network is constantly in the process of growth and
>>>>>> transformation (perpetually “becoming” as Marx puts it) even as
>>>>>> it exhibits certain proclivities towards solidity and permanence.
>>>>>> Marx’s concept of totality is, therefore, open, evolving,
>>>>>> self-replicating but in no sense self-sustaining, given its
>>>>>> internal contradictions and its penchant for breakdowns. Capital
>>>>>> creates a complex ecosystem of capital flows in continuous
>>>>>> historical evolution and formation.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> But Marx mainly limits his enquiries to what he calls the “inner
>>>>>> structure” of the totality of capital (Figure 1). While capital
>>>>>> may be the driving force, the foundational process within
>>>>>> bourgeois society, Marx recognizes that it does not say
>>>>>> everything that needs to be said about capitalism as a social
>>>>>> formation. The theory of capital as a mode of production is one
>>>>>> thing. The theory of capitalism as a social formation is quite
>>>>>> another. Marx mainly focuses on the former. But he does surround
>>>>>> his inner structure with critically important contextual
>>>>>> conditions that link together conditions in the social formation
>>>>>> with the dynamic laws of motion operating within the inner
>>>>>> structure of the mode of production.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Depictions of this sort are not unusual even in the exact
>>>>>> sciences. In /Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason /I
>>>>>> used the hydrological cycle (Figure 2) as a useful analogy.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The cyclical movement of H2O entails transformations of form
>>>>>> rather like those that occur in the circulation of capital. Water
>>>>>> in liquid form in the oceans evaporates with the heat of the sun
>>>>>> and moves as a vapour upwards until it condenses out as the
>>>>>> droplets that form clouds. As the particles merge and become
>>>>>> heavier they fall to ground as precipitation (rain, fog, dew,
>>>>>> snow, ice, hail, freezing rain). Once returned to the surface of
>>>>>> the earth some of the H20 passes directly back into the oceans,
>>>>>> some of it gets stuck on high ground or in cold regions as ice
>>>>>> that moves extremely slowly if at all, while the rest flows
>>>>>> downwards across the land as streams and rivers (with some water
>>>>>> evaporating back into the atmosphere) or under the land as ground
>>>>>> water back into the oceans. En route it is used by plants and
>>>>>> animals that transpire and perspire to return some H20 directly
>>>>>> to the atmosphere through evapo-transpiration. There are also
>>>>>> large amounts of water stored in ice fields or underground
>>>>>> aquifers. Like capital, not everything is in motion at the same
>>>>>> pace. Glaciers move at the proverbial glacial pace, torrents rush
>>>>>> down hill, groundwater sometimes takes many years to travel a few
>>>>>> miles.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This model depicts H2O passing through different forms and states
>>>>>> at different rates before returning to the oceans to start all
>>>>>> over again. This is very similar to how capital moves. It begins
>>>>>> as money capital before taking on commodity form passing through
>>>>>> production systems and emerging as new commodities to be sold
>>>>>> (monetized) in the market and the moneys are then distributed in
>>>>>> different forms to different factions of claimants (in the forms
>>>>>> of wages, interest, rent, taxes, profits) before returning to the
>>>>>> role of money capital once more. There is, however, one very
>>>>>> significant difference between the hydrological cycle and the
>>>>>> circulation of capital. The driving force in the hydrological
>>>>>> cycle is incoming energy from the sun and that is fairly constant
>>>>>> (though it oscillates a bit). Its conversion into heat has in the
>>>>>> past changed a great deal (plunging the earth into ice ages or
>>>>>> phases of tropical heat). In recent times the heat has been
>>>>>> increasing significantly due to entrapment by greenhouse gasses
>>>>>> (largely arising out of fossil fuel use). The total volume of H20
>>>>>> circulating remains fairly constant or changes slowly (measured
>>>>>> in historical as opposed to geological time) as ice caps melt and
>>>>>> underground aquifers get drained dry by human uses. In the case
>>>>>> of capital, the sources of energy, as we shall see, are more
>>>>>> varied and the volume of capital in motion is constantly
>>>>>> expanding at a compound rate because of a growth requirement that
>>>>>> derives from profit making. The hydrological cycle is closer to a
>>>>>> genuine cycle whereas the circulation of capital is, for reasons
>>>>>> we will soon explain, a spiral in constant expansion. But the two
>>>>>> totalities are in certain respects joined at the hip. The massive
>>>>>> increases in the use of fossil fuels deriving from the
>>>>>> requirement for endless growth and accumulation lies at the root
>>>>>> of the increasing heat retention on planet earth which, if it
>>>>>> continues at the present rate, will ultimately render the earth
>>>>>> uninhabitable for most if not all forms of human activity, in
>>>>>> part because of water deprivation and heat exhaustion in many
>>>>>> regions.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The totality of capital is, in some respects, like a human body
>>>>>> (though this analogy will ultimately prove misleading because an
>>>>>> ecosystem comprises many organisms in relation to each other
>>>>>> whereas the human body is just one organism amongst many). The
>>>>>> human body circulates blood through the heart, oxygen through the
>>>>>> lungs, ingests energy through the digestive system and the
>>>>>> stomach, deals with waste through the liver and kidneys while
>>>>>> coordination is exercised through the brain as a central nervous
>>>>>> system. Each of these circulation processes is autonomous and
>>>>>> independent and subject to specialised knowledge in the forms of
>>>>>> cardiology, neurology, gastro-enterology, urology, etc. But all
>>>>>> of these circulation processes are subsumed within the logic of
>>>>>> the human body and its laws of physical reproduction as a
>>>>>> totality. It makes no sense to assign a hierarchical structure of
>>>>>> importance or causality to the interactions and interrelations
>>>>>> between these different circulation processes. The failure of any
>>>>>> one of them threatens the life and existence of the human body.
>>>>>> There are, as we will later see, multiple ways in which capital
>>>>>> can collapse into crisis.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In the /Grundrisse/, Marx offers a description of the totality of
>>>>>> capital as constituted by way of several different independent
>>>>>> and autonomous circulation processes. Marx first looks at the
>>>>>> circulation of commodities and money. Not all money is capital.
>>>>>> Capital is money circulating in a particular way. Money becomes
>>>>>> money capital through its encounter with and purchase of the
>>>>>> capacity to labour as a commodity. Money capital is used to (1)
>>>>>> purchase the capacity to labour (labour power) along with
>>>>>> commodities that furnish material means of production (raw
>>>>>> materials, partially manufactured components, plant and
>>>>>> equipment, machinery, etc.): (2) these inputs are inserted into a
>>>>>> labour process, the technology of which is under the control of
>>>>>> capital, to produce a new commodity which is the property of
>>>>>> capital: (3) the monetary value of the new commodity is realized
>>>>>> through sale in the market that recoups the original monetary
>>>>>> outlay but adds a profit for capital: and (4) the money realised
>>>>>> has to be divided and distributed to different factions depending
>>>>>> upon their claims. Some of it goes to workers in the form of
>>>>>> wages, some is taken in the form of taxes going to the state,
>>>>>> interest goes to the financiers, merchant profit goes to
>>>>>> wholesalers and retailers as intermediaries, and rent flows to
>>>>>> the landlord in return for the use of the land. The industrial
>>>>>> capitalist who organizes production gets whatever is left over.
>>>>>> This distributed money power can be used in two ways. A part of
>>>>>> it will go to purchase commodities to consume so that the workers
>>>>>> along with the capitalist factions and the state employees can
>>>>>> live. The other part is brought back together (often with the
>>>>>> help of banks and other financial institutions) to reinvest as
>>>>>> money capital which then goes back through the circulation
>>>>>> process all over again.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This gives us a picture of the inner structure, the distinctive
>>>>>> circulation process for capital in general (Figure 1). This
>>>>>> circulation process is not pre-given or pre-defined. It is not
>>>>>> some ideal type waiting to be revealed or discovered, nor is it
>>>>>> fixed and determinate with respect to its reach in space and
>>>>>> time. It is something that has been and still is in the course of
>>>>>> being historically constructed and reconstructed through
>>>>>> continuous human social practices.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There is a far broader ecosystem within which this arbitrarily
>>>>>> abstracted totality called “capital” has its being. Hence in
>>>>>> Figure I we see the metabolic relation to nature and the
>>>>>> construction of a second nature through urbanization and the
>>>>>> building of physical infrastructures along with the production of
>>>>>> space and place relations. These are all contextually significant
>>>>>> to the more narrowly defined and bounded model of capital
>>>>>> circulation within the inner structure. The same can be said of
>>>>>> capital’s relation to human knowledge, social relations, culture
>>>>>> and tradition in existing populations, to conditions of social
>>>>>> reproduction and to the constant shaping and re-shaping of the
>>>>>> wants, needs and desires of populations that get expressed
>>>>>> through the diversity of human consumer preferences. What happens
>>>>>> in the realm of social reproduction has huge implications for how
>>>>>> the circulation of capital proceeds. But there I much that
>>>>>> happens in the course of social reproduction that has little
>>>>>> direct relation to the circulation of capital.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Lastly, the state’s role in accumulation cannot be ignored. Its
>>>>>> tentacles stretch far and wide within the inner structure of
>>>>>> capital and, as we shall see, a case can be made that the
>>>>>> capitalist state (or at least significant elements within it) is
>>>>>> a foundational form of capital itself. In other words, part of
>>>>>> state power (as is also the case with social reproduction) is
>>>>>> internal rather than external to the inner structure of the
>>>>>> circulation of capital. There is a mythical account of capital
>>>>>> being created purely by capitalists, collectively dragging
>>>>>> reluctant states along behind them. But from Bismarck’s Germany,
>>>>>> Meiji Japan, the military dictatorship in South Korea, the state
>>>>>> led revivals through the MITI organization in 1960s Japan, state
>>>>>> centered development in de Gaulle’s post-war France and the
>>>>>> ord-neoliberalism of the post-war West German State; in all of
>>>>>> these instances and many more, state-led capital accumulation has
>>>>>> been and in many respects still is in the vanguard. Even in the
>>>>>> United States, Hamiltonian politics and state-led initiatives on
>>>>>> land distribution played a critical role. State sponsored capital
>>>>>> accumulation in China since 1978 confirms the point.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Adam Smith’s major treatise, recall, was /The Wealth of Nations
>>>>>> /and not /The Wealth of Capital/. The wealth of the state, he
>>>>>> argued, could best be achieved by allowing the free functioning
>>>>>> of capitalists in a price-fixing market economy. Smith was giving
>>>>>> advice to statesmen not to capitalists on how wealth could be
>>>>>> created and captured by and within the state. It is in this
>>>>>> context that the otherwise mysterious title of Giovanni Arrighi’s
>>>>>> /Adam Smith in Beijing /makes sense. It gestures to what happened
>>>>>> in China after the liberation of market forces in 1978. The
>>>>>> significance of state-led accumulation has not been without its
>>>>>> contradictions, of course, and processes of class formation,
>>>>>> racialization and gender discriminations within the state have
>>>>>> just as easily led to arrested development of capital rather than
>>>>>> accelerating growth. The innumerable state links and bridges to
>>>>>> the institutions and life of civil society often produce
>>>>>> antagonistic currents within the wielding of state powers that
>>>>>> check and regulate rather than facilitate the ambitions of
>>>>>> capital. The ambitions of nationalists, socialists and
>>>>>> monopolists compete within the corridors of the state
>>>>>> institutions with those of capitalists.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The totality of capital’s inner structure exists within this much
>>>>>> broader totality of capitalism as a social formation. Marx’s
>>>>>> reason for conceptualizing such a distinction is that he sees
>>>>>> capital as the economic engine, the foundational power-house, the
>>>>>> source of the abstract forces, to which all of us who live under
>>>>>> the regime of capital are willy-nilly obligated and bound to some
>>>>>> degree. The general form of capital’s inner circulation within
>>>>>> the social formation are depicted in Figure 1. This is the
>>>>>> picture of the inner structure within the totality of the social
>>>>>> formation. We need to keep this picture in our heads as we probe
>>>>>> deeper and deeper into the details.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I here need to interject an important political comment. The
>>>>>> Hegelian legacy has long posed a serious challenge in the history
>>>>>> of Marxist thought, particularly with respect to the way we might
>>>>>> view a concept like totality. In the Hegelian idealist (albeit
>>>>>> dialectical) tradition, the totalizing forces make it difficult
>>>>>> to imagine any socialist escape from the prison-house of
>>>>>> bourgeois formulations and capitalist practices. The only option
>>>>>> seems to be blowing up the whole system and starting from
>>>>>> scratch, to build something totally different.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Such revolutionary extremism appears neither feasible nor
>>>>>> appealing, particularly in our day and age. For this reason, some
>>>>>> Marxist thinkers (such as Lukacs) gave up on the concept of
>>>>>> totality entirely while others quietly buried it. But Marx’s
>>>>>> concept of totality as an ecosystem invites consideration of the
>>>>>> internal mutations, the innumerable seeds of alternative
>>>>>> practices, the openings at every level to doing things
>>>>>> differently, establishing different social relations, cultivating
>>>>>> alternative patches of human practices in Zapatista Chiapas, in
>>>>>> Kurdish Rojava, in the recuperated factories of Argentina, in the
>>>>>> communitarian and collective agrarian practices sprouting in all
>>>>>> sorts of places around the world. There are plenty of abandoned
>>>>>> spaces and places and derelict zones open throughout the world to
>>>>>> experiment with anti-capitalist alternatives. While capitalist
>>>>>> and bourgeois practices are overwhelmingly hegemonic,
>>>>>> particularly in the centers of political and economic power, the
>>>>>> possibility to cultivate alternatives is everywhere apparent. The
>>>>>> seeds of an alternative socialism are liberally scattered around
>>>>>> the world and from time to time they fall upon fertile ground.
>>>>>> This would be virtually impossible within the constraints of the
>>>>>> Hegelian conception.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> We have to lay to rest at the outset, therefore, the idea that
>>>>>> the concept of totality is so totalizing and limiting as to make
>>>>>> the construction of alternatives almost impossible.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Strangely, this opening does not in itself threaten the
>>>>>> perpetuation and dominance of the bourgeois and capitalist
>>>>>> ecosystem. Indeed, the evidence suggests that the openness and
>>>>>> the indeterminacy within the ecosystemic totality that is capital
>>>>>> contributes mightily to its reproduction capacity and long-term
>>>>>> survival. It allows for the cultivation of all manner of impulses
>>>>>> towards renewal often accomplished through crises. Marx, for
>>>>>> example, recognized that the perpetual renewal of the capitalist
>>>>>> class by absorbing fresh and dynamic elements within itself from
>>>>>> elsewhere, has played a critical role in the reproduction and
>>>>>> perpetuation of capital’s class power. While Henry Ford was a key
>>>>>> figure in the 1920s, it is Jeff Bezos a century later. Many of
>>>>>> the innovations for which the capitalist tradition is justly
>>>>>> famous have their origins in the entrepreneurial openness of
>>>>>> capital’s ecosystem as well as in the socialist impulse to
>>>>>> explore alternatives come what may. The evolution of social
>>>>>> media, for example, was initially as much driven by emancipatory
>>>>>> impulses from the left as by commercial or military concerns.
>>>>>> This openness to all manner of innovation inevitably creates the
>>>>>> cracks through which the light of a socialist or oligarchic
>>>>>> alternative can perpetually shine.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Marx’s /Grundrisse /is structured as an enquiry into the
>>>>>> different circulation processes that produce and support capital
>>>>>> as a totality. Elaborating on them, we have:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> * 1 The Circulation of Commodities through Exchange
>>>>>> * 2 The Circulation of Money as Money (commodity moneys,
>>>>>> coinage, fiat moneys regulated by the state, etc.).
>>>>>> * 3 The Circulation of Money as Capital (Figure 1)
>>>>>> * 4 The Circulation of Capacity to Labour (Figure 2)
>>>>>> * 5 The Circulation of Capital as Fixed Capital and the
>>>>>> Consumption Fund (Figure 3)
>>>>>> * 6 The Circulation of Interest-Bearing Capital (private debt)
>>>>>> * 7 The Circulation of Tax Revenues and of State Debt.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The overall circulation process of capital can be disaggregated
>>>>>> in other ways. In Volume 2 of /Capital/, Marx distinguishes
>>>>>> between the circulation of capital as money, the circulation of
>>>>>> capital as commodities, the circulation of capital through
>>>>>> production and the circulation of all three forms taken together.
>>>>>> Marx’s point here is to show that the form capital takes opens up
>>>>>> radically different possibilities and opportunities for the
>>>>>> capitalist on the ground at the same time as it imposes certain
>>>>>> constraints. When capital is in its money form it offers all
>>>>>> sorts of open possibilities for redeployment and mobility across
>>>>>> sectors and regions compared to when it is locked into acts of
>>>>>> production that may require heavy investment in immobile plant
>>>>>> and equipment that cannot be moved without the devaluation and
>>>>>> destruction of capital. A capitalist industrialist may have a
>>>>>> steel plant valued at ten million dollars but that is very
>>>>>> different from a capitalist armed with ten million dollars in
>>>>>> cash who can use it, as did George Soros, to bet on currency
>>>>>> exchange rates so as to quadruple his money capital in one week.
>>>>>> If money is the butterfly form of capital and commodities are the
>>>>>> caterpillar form then production is the chrysalis form where
>>>>>> value and surplus value are incubated.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In Volume 3 of /Capital/, these technical features are enriched
>>>>>> by the emergence of class factions: merchant capitalists
>>>>>> concentrate and specialise around the circulation of commodities
>>>>>> in the market, finance capitalists and bankers concentrate on the
>>>>>> money flows and industrialists concentrate on production much of
>>>>>> which is locked into place by sunk investments. While it is true
>>>>>> that the industrialists operate at the heart of the creation and
>>>>>> production of value and surplus value the same cannot be said
>>>>>> about appropriation.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Merchant capitalists can in certain circumstances dominate
>>>>>> appropriation, exercising the power of monopsony, as do WalMart,
>>>>>> IKEA, Home Depot and the major shoe and clothing brands. Even
>>>>>> electronics operates this way. Apple, for example, dominates at
>>>>>> the front end of design of product and operates in part as a
>>>>>> merchant appropriating much if not most of the surplus value at
>>>>>> the sales end. In between are Foxconn and a whole supply chain of
>>>>>> part makers who produce most of the surplus value in Asia that
>>>>>> Apple appropriates in the United States and Europe as well as in
>>>>>> China. In automobiles, on the other hand, the producers hold the
>>>>>> power, mobilizing a network of dealerships and financiers in
>>>>>> their service. General Motors, for example, created a whole
>>>>>> finance unit to extend credit which ultimately evolved into
>>>>>> General Motors Acceptance Corporation as an independent bank.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The power relations between these factions are fluid and
>>>>>> contingent depending upon sector and geographical situation.
>>>>>> Plainly, since the 1970s capital in general has witnessed a shift
>>>>>> in which the merchant and finance factions have expanded their
>>>>>> power at the expense of industrial capital, though unevenly. One
>>>>>> measure of this is to look closely at the sectors from which
>>>>>> billionaires emanate today as opposed to yesteryear.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In Volume Two and the /Grundrisse/, Marx also examines the
>>>>>> circulation of fixed capital (including infrastructures for
>>>>>> production) and investment flows into the consumption fund
>>>>>> (houses, hospitals, schools, etc). It is clear that these forms
>>>>>> of circulation have become far more prominent in contemporary
>>>>>> capitalism than was the case even in the 1970s. Marx also studies
>>>>>> different working periods and turnover times, followed by
>>>>>> chapters on the circulation of variable capital (as wages) and
>>>>>> surplus value (as profit), culminating in the modelling of
>>>>>> circulation relations between capital and labour in a
>>>>>> macroeconomic setting.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The reproduction schemas presented at the end of Volume Two, it
>>>>>> is now acknowledged, were one of the first coherent attempts to
>>>>>> build a macroeconomic model of the capitalist economy as a
>>>>>> totality. Conventional economics only got around to modelling
>>>>>> this in the 1930s.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The boundedness of the totality (both structurally and
>>>>>> geographically) as Marx construes it is to some degree
>>>>>> arbitrarily imposed by the investigator of the ecosystem even
>>>>>> when there are strong concrete conditions that logically support
>>>>>> a particular definition of boundedness. In the case of the human
>>>>>> body, to follow on with this analogy, there are strong reasons to
>>>>>> treat of it as a working totality for purposes of medical
>>>>>> investigation, diagnosis and analysis. But the general social
>>>>>> conditions in which that body operates cannot be ignored in any
>>>>>> approach to health conditions in society. While, for example, a
>>>>>> cause of death might be very specific from the medical
>>>>>> standpoint, the social context of substance abuse and opioid
>>>>>> addictions, of alienation and social anomie, and all the economic
>>>>>> and social reasons that lie behind these phenomena are of great
>>>>>> significance to understanding recent trends in morbidity. The
>>>>>> analogy of the human body within the social order usefully
>>>>>> extends to the idea of sovereign state economies within which
>>>>>> some hard and fairly fast rules are established for policy
>>>>>> formation and the regulation of capital flow and labour provision
>>>>>> within an open but bounded territorial organization of the
>>>>>> inter-state system. It was only in the 1920s that data began to
>>>>>> be collected as if there were such a thing as a national state
>>>>>> economy. The behaviour of each sovereign state within the
>>>>>> inter-state system depends upon political and economic conditions
>>>>>> as well upon the forms of collective action organized for the
>>>>>> defense of state interests which extend beyond simply that of
>>>>>> accumulating economic wealth and power The effects of inter-state
>>>>>> competition and geopolitical strategizing upon the health and
>>>>>> productivity of capital in general are of great significance.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In Marx’s conception of capital’s totality, the emphasis is upon
>>>>>> the fluidity, instability and creativity of the processes that
>>>>>> sustain and create it. In the /Grundrisse, /Marx strives to come
>>>>>> to terms with this “becoming” of capital as a totality: "this
>>>>>> organic system itself, as a totality, has its presuppositions,
>>>>>> and its development to its totality consists precisely in
>>>>>> subordinating all elements of society to itself or in creating
>>>>>> out of it the organs, which it still lacks. This is historically
>>>>>> how it becomes a totality. The process of becoming this totality
>>>>>> forms a moment of its process of its development…..This society
>>>>>> then seizes hold of a new territory, as e.g. the
>>>>>> colonies…."(/Grundrisse /278). The diffusion of capital’s
>>>>>> productive forces and social relations across the whole world
>>>>>> then follows. The creation of the world market is thereby
>>>>>> foundational within the capitalist imperative, no matter whether
>>>>>> produced through colonial occupations and imperialist impositions
>>>>>> or by way of the invisible threads of multiple networks of
>>>>>> commercial interactions and money capital flows.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The crystallization out of various features within the totality
>>>>>> can, on the other hand, guide, inhibit, imprison or exacerbate
>>>>>> the processes that historically constitute it. This
>>>>>> crystallization (objectification) can from time to time become
>>>>>> downright sclerotic with respect to ideas as well as practices.
>>>>>> It then appears as if humanity has imprisoned itself in its own
>>>>>> web of social (class) relations, ideological configurations and
>>>>>> institutional arrangements (e.g. the law) and customary
>>>>>> practices, to say nothing of remarkable built environments. It
>>>>>> constantly finds itself straining to break the bonds and barriers
>>>>>> that it itself creates. This is the foundational contradiction
>>>>>> within the capitalist mode of production. It is the contradiction
>>>>>> that invites the idea of a transition to an alternative socialist
>>>>>> mode of production. It also invites us to consider the role of
>>>>>> crises in the renewal of capital. Crises “are never more than
>>>>>> momentary violent solutions for the existing contradictions,
>>>>>> violent eruptions that re-establish the balance that has been
>>>>>> disturbed.” (358) There is one further foundational question that
>>>>>> has to be posed. As we have already seen, capital takes on
>>>>>> multiple forms (commodities, productive activity, money) as it
>>>>>> circulates. This poses the question of what is it that these
>>>>>> different forms (“moments”) have in common? What renders them
>>>>>> commensurable and convertible into each other? Marx’s answer is
>>>>>> that they all, in one way or another, reflect something important
>>>>>> about the qualities and quantities of human labour applied in
>>>>>> their creation. Marx calls this quality “value.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> While all commodities exchanging in the market are valued in
>>>>>> terms of their relation to human labour, not all products of
>>>>>> human labour are commodities. If I prepare a tacos lunch for
>>>>>> family and friends on Sunday then that entails the application of
>>>>>> human labour. But it entails the production of a use value but
>>>>>> not value. If I do exactly the same thing on Monday for sale in a
>>>>>> restaurant, then the tacos have potentially both a use and
>>>>>> exchange value. Their value is realised through a sale to a
>>>>>> customer. “Labour /with the same content /can therefore be both
>>>>>> productive and unproductive.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> There is, as Marx points out, plenty of room for ambivalence in
>>>>>> this distinction.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> “Milton, for example, who did /Paradise Lost/, was an
>>>>>> unproductive worker. In contrast to this, the writer who
>>>>>> delivers hackwork for his publisher is a productive worker.
>>>>>> Milton produced /Paradise Lost /in the way that a silkworm
>>>>>> produces silk, as the expression of /his own /nature. Later
>>>>>> on he sold the product for £5 and to that extent became a
>>>>>> dealer in a commodity. But the Leipzig literary proletarian
>>>>>> who produces books, e.g. compendia on political economy, at
>>>>>> the instructions of his publisher is roughly speaking a
>>>>>> productive worker, in so far as his production is subsumed
>>>>>> under capital and only takes place for the purpose of the
>>>>>> latter’s valorisation. A singer who sings like a bird is an
>>>>>> unproductive worker.If she sells her singing for money, she
>>>>>> is to that extent a wage labourer or a commodity dealer.But
>>>>>> the same singer, when engaged by an entrepreneur who has her
>>>>>> sing in order to make money, is a productive worker, for she
>>>>>> directly /produces /capital. A schoolmaster who educates
>>>>>> others is not a productive worker. But a schoolmaster who is
>>>>>> engaged as a wage labourer in an institution along with
>>>>>> others, in order through his labour to valorise the money of
>>>>>> the entrepreneur of the knowledge-mongering institution, is a
>>>>>> productive worker.”
>>>>>>
>>>>>> In writing this text, I am an unproductive worker and I can claim
>>>>>> the same imperative that leads the silkworm to produce silk. It
>>>>>> is in my nature! But when a publisher takes this content and
>>>>>> turns it into a book for sale in the market then I may receive a
>>>>>> royalty for permitting the publisher to use my content to
>>>>>> generate surplus value (profit).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Value gets created in the first instance through the application
>>>>>> of living labour in production for sale in the market at a
>>>>>> profit. It gets represented and realized in circulation and
>>>>>> consumption. Value courses through all the different moments. Its
>>>>>> initial measure is given as socially necessary labour time. i.e.
>>>>>> the time on average taken by labour to produce a commodity ready
>>>>>> for market. This definition of value needs, at this point, to be
>>>>>> taken on faith. It is immaterial in the sense that it is
>>>>>> impossible to cut a commodity open and extract the value from it.
>>>>>> Yet it is objective because if I take a commodity to market and
>>>>>> no one buys it then the labour embodied in it is socially
>>>>>> unnecessary and hence not-value.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Value is a conceptual abstraction of the sort familiar across the
>>>>>> sciences and social sciences. We cannot measure gravity directly
>>>>>> but infer its existence from its effects. We cannot measure the
>>>>>> political power of someone like Donald Trump directly, but we can
>>>>>> infer its existence because of its effects. Capital is not an
>>>>>> objectified thing (as in conventional economics) but a process of
>>>>>> value in motion. It passes through the different moments of
>>>>>> money, commodity, production, consumption and distribution before
>>>>>> once again appearing as money capital.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> The speed of its motion is constantly changing. In the course of
>>>>>> its motion, capital exhibits the capacity to expand itself, to be
>>>>>> the fount of the profit, the lust for which powers the whole
>>>>>> system ever onwards.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This leaves us with the final conundrum: where does the increment
>>>>>> in value – the surplus value - come from? This is what grounds
>>>>>> the profit which capital appropriates.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> -=-=-
>>>>>>
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