HOST: David Harvey is a Marxist thinker about political economy and has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital for over 40 years. He currently teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Prof. Harvey has written extensively on the significance of Marx’s Capital for understanding contemporary capitalism, and will be presenting this knowledge and more to his podcast audience.
When trying to interpret,
understand and analyze the daily flow of news, I tend to locate what is
happening against the background of two distinctive but intersecting models of
how capitalism works. The first level is
a mapping of the internal contradictions of the circulation and accumulation of
capital as money value flows in search of profit through the different
“moments” (as Marx calls them) of production, realization (consumption),
distribution, and reinvestment. This is a model of the capitalist economy as
a spiral of endless expansion and growth. It gets pretty complicated as it gets
elaborated through, for example, the lenses of geopolitical rivalries, uneven
geographical developments, financial institutions, state policies, technological
reconfigurations and the ever-changing web of divisions of labour and of social
relations. I envision this model as embedded, however, in a broader context of
social reproduction (in households and communities), in an on-going and
ever-evolving metabolic relation to nature (including the “second nature” of
urbanization and the built environment) and all manner of cultural, scientific
(knowledge-based), religious and contingent social formations that human
populations typically create across space and time. These latter “moments” incorporate the active
expression of human wants, needs and desires, the lust for knowledge and meaning
and the evolving quest for fulfillment against a background of changing institutional
arrangements, political contestations, ideological confrontations, losses, defeats,
frustrations and alienations, all worked out in a world of marked geographical,
cultural, social and political diversity.
This second model constitutes, as it were, my working understanding of global
capitalism as a distinctive social formation, whereas the first is about the contradictions
within the economic engine that powers this social formation along certain pathways
of its historical and geographical evolution.
A new course featuring David Harvey teaching Karl Marx’s Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft).
Written during the winter of 1857-8, the Grundrisse was considered by Marx to be the first scientific elaboration of communist theory.
Recorded live in 2020 first at The People’s Forum and then in quarantine, these 12 accessible lectures both guide the reader through the major themes of Marx’s seminal text, as well as feature contemporary commentary relating the text to the pandemic and economic crisis.
The text for this course is Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft) by Karl Marx. The page numbers Professor Harvey refers to are from the Penguin Classics edition, translated by Martin Nicolaus, ISBN: 978-0140445756. The text of the Grundrisse can also be found for free on the Marxists Internet Archive.
In this lecture, David Harvey offers a close reading of Volume III of Karl Marx’s Capital to distinguish the rate of growth versus the mass of growth. Most economists, policy makers, politicians, and the financial press are very concerned about the rate of growth. The rate of growth is in turn critical to the formulation of policy. Yet the mass of growth is actually more significant, and deserves careful analysis. This lecture will devote special attention to the mass of growth. It will ask: What is the mass of growth? Who controls the mass of wealth? What are we going to do with the mass that is produced?
A close reading of the text of Karl Marx’s Capital Volume I in 12 lectures by Professor David Harvey. Recorded at The People’s Forum in New York City in 2019.
Podcast available on Spotify, iTunes, and RSS. New episodes every Thursday.
Neoliberalism continues in national and transnational institutions, even though it has lost legitimacy as an ideology and has even penetrated progressive thinking, argues Prof. David Harvey
The main alternative to neoliberalism is the proposed renewal of social democracy, such as in the form of Bernie Sanders’ proposals. But to move forward we need to discuss the limits of a welfare state that ultimately does not change class relations, says David Harvey
Three Marxist Takes On Climate Change Michael Hudson, Bertell Ollman and David Harvey June 30, 2019 Left Forum 2019 LIU Brooklyn Video: Essential Dissent
The End of the “End of History”: The Left Alternative to Conservative Liberalism. The Failure of Fukuyama’s Forecast
David Harvey, Michael Hudson, David M. Kotz, Alexander Buzgalin
June 29, 2019
Left Forum 2019
LIU Brooklyn
Sponsor: Center for Modern Marxist Studies, Lomonosov Moscow State University
Video: Open University of the Left
Five complete courses are available for free in both video and podcast form on Marx's Capital v1 (2007 & 2019 editions), v2, Grundrisse, and my book Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason.
Subscribe to a course as a video or audio podcast with iTunes. Choose M4V for iPhone / iPad.
Volume I:
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Volume 2:
