Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey

You are invited to a book party to celebrate publication of

A COMPANION TO MARX’S CAPITAL

by David Harvey

Tuesday March 2nd at 6.30pm

The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, Sociology Lounge (room 6112)
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Free event, open to all

“David Harvey provoked a revolution in his field and has inspired a generation of radical intellectuals. Read this book … “—Naomi Klein

RSVP clara@versobooks.com / 718-246-8160

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David Harvey’s new book, A Companion to Marx’s Capital, has been published by Verso and is now available on Amazon and in your local bookstore.

“My aim is to get you to read a book by Karl Marx called Capital, Volume 1, and to read it on Marx’s own terms…”

The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression has generated a surge of interest in Marx’s work in the effort to understand the origins of our current predicament. For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectured on Capital, becoming one of the world’s most foremost Marx scholars.

Based on his recent online lectures, this current volume aims to bring this depth of learning to a broader audience, guiding first-time readers through a fascinating and deeply rewarding text. A Companion to Marx’s Capital offers fresh, original and sometimes critical interpretations of a book that changed the course of history and, as Harvey intimates, may do so again.

“David Harvey provoked a revolution in his field and has inspired a generation of radical intellectuals.  Read this book…” Naomi Klein

Reshaping Economic Geography: The World Development Report 2009
David Harvey
Dec 15 2009 4:15AM
Development and Change 40(6):1269–1277 (2009). Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. Published by Blackwell Publishing. Download article as PDF

World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography. Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2009. xvii + 383 pp. $26 paperback.

Something ominous began to happen in 2006. The rate of foreclosures in low-income areas of older US cities began to increase. Officialdom and the media took very little notice because, as had happened many years before in the early stages of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the communities affected were low-income, mainly African-American or immigrant (Hispanics), in cities like Cleveland and Detroit that were in any case already blighted and deteriorated. It was only in mid-2007, when the foreclosure wave had spread to white middle class areas as well as to the US South (Florida in particular) and Southwest (California), where new housing tract developments, often in peripheral areas, were becoming vulnerable, that officialdom started to take notice and the mainstream press began to comment. By the end of that year, nearly 2 million people had lost their homes and estimates began to emerge that another 4 or perhaps 6 million more might be lost before it was all over. By the autumn of 2008, the phenomenon of the ‘sub-prime mortgage crisis’ had led to the demise of all the major Wall Street Investment Banks, either through change of status or through forced mergers, and the outright bankruptcy of Lehman that triggered a worldwide collapse of confidence in financial institutions. The contagion then spread outwards from banking to the major holders of mortgage debt (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) along with insurance giants like AIG, before hitting the rest of the economy big- time towards the end of 2008. By early 2009 the export-led industrialization model that had generated such spectacular growth in East and Southeast Asia was contracting at an alarming rate; at the same time, many icons of American capitalism, such as General Motors, were moving closer to bankruptcy.

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Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition
David Harvey
Talk given at the World Social Forum 2010
Porto Alegre

The historical geography of capitalist development is at a key inflexion point in which the geographical configurations of power are rapidly shifting at the very moment when the temporal dynamic is facing very serious constraints.  Three percent compound growth (generally considered the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy) is becoming less and less feasible to sustain without resort to all manner of fictions (such as those that have characterized asset markets and financial affairs over the last two decades). There are good reasons to believe that there is no alternative to a new global order of governance that will eventually have to manage the transition to a zero growth economy.  If that is to be done in an equitable way, then there is no alternative to socialism or communism.  Since the late 1990s, the World Social Forum became the center for articulating the theme “another world is possible.”  It must now take up the task of defining how another socialism or communism is possible and how the transition to these alternatives are to be accomplished.  The current crisis offers a window of opportunity to reflect on what might be involved.

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Imagining Radical Change with David Harvey & Alexander Cockburn
GRITtv with Laura Flanders
November 19, 2009