Don Flynn on Marxist Political Economy today
The Story of Capital by David Harvey published by Verso
The revival of interest in Marxian studies of political economy follows cycles which mirror what is happening within the capitalist system itself. As crisis tendencies bubble up, there is an almost inevitable turn towards Marx’s Capital to gain understanding as to what might be going on.
For this generation, the chances are that this will be via the work of British-born David Harvey, a US-based academic who has been wrestling with Marx’s opus since the 1970s. The Story of Capital sits alongside his other engagements with the critique of political economy, which include The Limits of Capital (1982), Spaces of Capital (2001), and A Companion to Marx’s Capital (2010).
A geographer rather than an economist, Harvey arrived at his subject through consideration of the ways that capital produces the world and then reproduces itself on an ongoing basis. He sees it as “value in motion”, moving in spiral fashion on and into new conditions of being, managing but not overcoming the contradictions inherent in a system; lives through its exploitation of human capacity for productive endeavour, but always recycling productive gains (“surplus value”) into a reinforcement of the class conditions needed for its continuation.
What is new to say about this subject that hasn’t already been said in his previous writing and his work as a teacher? There are several issues to address that haven’t been exhaustively considered in this other work. A crucial example is the consideration given to the challenge that technological innovation poses for the reproduction of capital. He describes a central contradiction of contemporary capitalism emerging from the increase in labour productivity facilitated by new technologies such as artificial intelligence (he prefers to call it machine learning), but which also reduces the surplus value of the goods produced. A device with the computing power of the laptop I am writing this review on is priced at a few hundred pounds today, but fifty years ago, its power would have been valued in multiples of thousands.
Capital compensates for this loss of value by increasing the mass of goods produced. Instead of seeking an acceptable return on investment through the manufacture of, say, a thousand very expensive items, it will aim to garner the same from the production and marketing of a million. The question then arises as to where it finds a market for this larger volume of goods.
Harvey argues that capitalist state theory must step up at this point to explain how profits are realised in the market. Technological innovation is advancing in these times through the contracts forged between national states and the giant tech corporations for their products in areas like aerospace, pharmaceuticals, armaments and munitions, communications and surveillance technologies. Absorbing massive amounts of technological innovation through these contracts reshapes economies in ways which require mass markets. Capital is often considered a book centrally concerned with capitalist production – what goes on in factories and other workplaces – but Harvey shows how equally important it is for understanding how profit is realised during the circulation of mobile, interest-bearing capital.
Chapters on environmentally damaging extractivism, the growing significance of financialised forms of capital (interest-bearing capital), the return of the rentier, and the geopolitics of capital also do important work in setting out the continued relevance of Marx’s work to our present predicament. Harvey helps mark out the common ground which links socialist insight to the contemporary struggles being mounted by the “99 per cent”.
However, he suggests that Capital is not a work which can be appropriated for any narrow political project and presented as a reliable guide to the overthrow of the capitalist system. His instance of a “spiral form” of the development of capital that carries tensions and contradictions to higher levels without resolving them points to new relations of production and circulation emerging at every point, each with its cohorts of exploited and victims of expropriation who are finding new ways to struggle against the logic of the system. If they get the chance, they might find Harvey’s thoughts on the issues useful, and maybe delve into his famous courses on reading capital, available on his YouTube channel.