✍️ The #CFP is now open for the 4th edition of the Karl Marx Congress, which will take place in Lisbon in January 2027. The aim of this edition is to analyse the crisis of neoliberal capitalism (from the 1980s to the first quarter of the 21st century) from two perspectives: the historical perspective and that of the theoretical debate on the crisis in its various dimensions.
📅 Deadline for submissions: 30 June
O capitalismo ainda cava sua própria cova?Contradições e lutas no Brasil hoje
Karl #Marx hatte keine fertigen Antworten.
Michael Heinrich zeigt: Marx’ Denken entsteht aus Krisen, Konflikten und Neuanfängen - kein gerader Weg zum „Kapital“, sondern ein Denker in Bewegung.
Band 1 ist längst ein Klassiker. Band 2 kommt dieses Jahr. Das #Proletariat hat lange genug gewartet. 👀
Karl Marx referenced Hegel in 1852, noting that great historical events appear twice: "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Martin Walser: Über Deutschland reden (1988)
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://liberalkonservativlesen.de/martin-walser-ueber-deutschland-reden-1988/
The Story of Capital. What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works. David Harvey. Review.
The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works David Harvey. Review.
“This book is one more step in telling the story of capital in a way that can, I hope, understand and use both personally and politically” writes David Harvey in the Preface to this important new work from one of the world’s most respected Marxist scholars.
The author, known (AI informs us) for concepts such as the spatial fix (resolving capital accumulation crises through geographical expansion), time-space compression (acceleration of economic life reducing spatial barriers), accumulation by dispossession (privatization of public assets), and the right to the city, has made a deep impression on many readers. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989), and A Companion to Marx’s Capital (2010) looked at ‘flexible accumulation’, and to “shifts in surface appearance” rather than “signs … of some entirely new” order. The latter (Volume 1) is a highly readable guide which explicates such issues as Marx’s focus on the struggle over the “length of the working day, and the empowerment of the working class movement” Harvey asserted that Marx saw that such issues cannot be resolved by appeals to ‘right’ (human rights) but should be resolved “in class struggle terms”. One can, nevertheless, observe that human rights, the ‘rights of man’, as they were known in the 19th century, have played an enduring role on the left, marking many currents off from liberal imperialism and fuelling opposition to Stalinism.
The Story of Capital begins by offering a picture of “capital’s totality as an organic system in perpetual evolution”. The “hydrological cycle” is used as an analogy for capital’s circulation. This is an image which will appeal more to those already familiar with Marx’s premises than to the unconverted. Perhaps more successful for a wider audience is Harvey’s emphasis that Marx derived his theory of capital’s mode of production from a close study of of Manchester industrialism as a social formation”. Famously his comrade Engel’s based his The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 around the city. Harvey argues that far from being a spatial, or cultural, limitation this location in the “emerging global economy of nineteenth century capitalism” intermediating between slave labour of the cotton fields of the southern United States and the teaming populations of South Asia as its main market …pioneered the global production-consumption networks that dominate the world today. “(Page 75)
Another resource which succeeds in conveying often abstract arguments to a public beyond Marxists is the historical work of the late Giovanni Arrighi. He was also grounded in history, seeing in Marx’s work such insights as how “national debts pioneered by Genoa and Venice the late Middle Ages in propelling the initial expansion modern capitalism” (Page 13. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. 1996). For Harvey this illustrates the “historical fusion of state and capital” .”interstate competition had and still has a fundamental role in directing the global flows of capital in space and time” he writes (Page 302).
The Story of Capital is a deep and stimulating exploration of Marx’s – and many types of Marxist approaches – conceptual and historical architecture. In the chapter on Extractive and the Metabolic relation to Nature the book offers important insights into the way capitalism has exploited and destroyed natural resources. The fraught relationship between state national interests, capital flows, and nationalist policies which “may disrupt global capital mobility and labour flows” remans politically centre-stage. Another aspect of modern capitalism, The “return of the rentier” can be seen in the colonisation of public services. The modern coupon-clippers who have wroke havoc in Britain, from care homes, nurseries and the provision of teaching and civil service pensions are part of global trend to colonise public provision. The “explosion of the speculative boom that has dominated since the 1980s” is still with us.
Socialist internationalists will be puzzled by Harvey’s claim that “The nationalist politics that led the British into Brexit could have expressed a desire to decouple a British socialist project from an increasingly bureaucratised and corporatised European Union” (Page 156). Alas, the Conservative Sovereigntists, Nigel Farage, and business believers in Singapore-on-Thames leaders of Brexit project drowned out the powerful words of New Left Review, the Morning Star, the Full Brexit Sovereigntist, and the Spartacist League.
A more appealing prospect is offered on a “metropolitan scale”. Here, “the power of collective solidarities and action in the collective management of the common” Harvey declares, the Marxist-anarchist distinction makes little sense. While the other-globalisation movement may have faltered, hope remains. “The Hanseatic League lasted for two centuries, I fantasise that we might build such a League of Socialist Cities that can initially work within the the frameworks of market exchange to support more equitable social relations…” (Page 342). Can Ipswich, a historic English port with strong medieval ties to the Hanseatic League, apply to join?
*****
See also this critique: David Harvey and the ever-changing contours of capitalism. Michael Roberts
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