This is the first class of a free semester-long open course consisting of a close reading of the text of Marx’s Capital Volume II (plus parts of Volume III) in 12 video lectures by Professor David Harvey. David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center in the Anthropology and Geography PhD programs. This course was taught at Union Theological Seminary in Spring 2011, and was attended by graduate students and activists from across New York City.
Subsequent videos will be available every one to two weeks. Initially the videos will be available only on YouTube. Additional file formats and podcasts will be available soon.
The page numbers Professor Harvey refers to are valid for the Penguin Classics editions of Capital Volumes II and III.
Thanks to the over 300 small donors who made this project possible.
Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
To be published in April 2012 by Verso Books. Available for pre-order on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk now.
Long before the Occupy movement, modern cities had already become the central sites of revolutionary politics, where the deeper currents of social and political change rise to the surface. Consequently, cities have been the subject of much utopian thinking. But at the same time they are also the centers of capital accumulation and the frontline for struggles over who controls access to urban resources and who dictates the quality and organization of daily life. Is it the financiers and developers, or the people?
Rebel Cities places the city at the heart of both capital and class struggles, looking at locations ranging from Johannesburg to Mumbai, and from New York City to São Paulo. Drawing on the Paris Commune as well as Occupy Wall Street and the London Riots, Harvey asks how cities might be reorganized in more socially just and ecologically sane ways—and how they can become the focus for anti-capitalist resistance.
Paul Mason of the Guardian writes that The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism is “the most complete Marxist attempt to situate the global crisis in the context of the irresolvable tensions of a system based on ‘self-expanding money’”. Read his article Books for Giving: Economics / Responses to the global financial meltdown.
Do you have a few minutes to spare to help make the Capital lectures available to speakers of languages other than English? We are making good progress in the Capital Lectures Transcription and Translation Project. We are now focused on correcting the English transcription of the first five lectures. To help, go to this site and choose one of the first five lectures. Watch the lecture in YouTube with closed captions turned on (just click the CC button in the lower right of the window), and correct any errors you find on our wiki.
After this is complete, volunteer translators will begin translating the subtitles into other languages. We already have volunteers ready to begin translating into Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Persian, Slovene, and Spanish. We just need a little help making sure we have an accurate English transcript for them to work with.
The End of Capitalism?
Dr. S.T. Lee Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities
Penn Humanities Forum
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
November 30, 2011
Rebels on the Street: The Party of Wall Street Meets its Nemesis
David Harvey Verso Books Blog
October 28, 2011
The Party of Wall Street has ruled unchallenged in the United States for far too long. It has totally (as opposed to partially) dominated the policies of Presidents over at least four decades (if not longer), no matter whether individual Presidents have been its willing agents or not. It has legally corrupted Congress via the craven dependency of politicians in both political parties upon its raw money power and upon access to the mainstream media that it controls. Thanks to the appointments made and approved by Presidents and Congress, the Party of Wall Street dominates much of the state apparatus as well as the judiciary, in particular the Supreme Court, whose partisan judgments increasingly favor venal money interests, in spheres as diverse as electoral, labor, environmental and contract law.
The Party of Wall Street has one universal principle of rule: that there shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to rule absolutely. And that power is to be exercised with one objective. Those possessed of money power shall not only be privileged to accumulate wealth endlessly at will, but they shall have the right to inherit the earth, taking either direct or indirect dominion not only of the land and all the resources and productive capacities that reside therein, but also assume absolute command, directly or indirectly, over the labor and creative potentialities of all those others it needs. The rest of humanity shall be deemed disposable. Continue Reading »
Feral Capitalism Hits the Streets
by David Harvey
11 August 2011
“Nihilistic and feral teenagers” the Daily Mail called them: the crazy youths from all walks of life who raced around the streets mindlessly and desperately hurling bricks, stones and bottles at the cops while looting here and setting bonfires there, leading the authorities on a merry chase of catch-as-catch-can as they tweeted their way from one strategic target to another.
The word “feral” pulled me up short. It reminded me of how the communards in Paris in 1871 were depicted as wild animals, as hyenas, that deserved to be (and often were) summarily executed in the name of the sanctity of private property, morality, religion, and the family. But then the word conjured up another association: Tony Blair attacking the “feral media,” having for so long been comfortably lodged in the left pocket of Rupert Murdoch only later to be substituted as Murdoch reached into his right pocket to pluck out David Cameron. Continue Reading »
A close reading of the text of Karl Marx's Capital in free video lectures by David Harvey. Start here
David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and author of numerous books. He has been teaching Karl Marx's Capital for over 40 years. Read his CV.
