The Enigma of Capital was released in the UK on April 15th by Profile Books, and is currently available from Amazon UK. It has been reviewed by The Independent and the Financial Times.

Professor Harvey went on a speaking tour of London in support of the book.  You can watch several of his lectures online:

• The RSA April 26
• London School of Economics April 26
• King’s College April 27

Professor Harvey also gave several press interviews which you can watch or listen to here:

• BBC News Hard Talk May 5
• BBC World Service The Forum May 2
• BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed April 28
• The Guardian ‘The Business’ Podcast April 28

“Professor David Harvey on the need to think of alternatives to capitalism as endless growth is no longer a possibility. ”

Watch trailer | Watch in UK | Watch outside of UK: (part 1) (part 2) (part 3)

“Innovation: One of America’s most prominent Nano scientists, Harvard Professor George Whitesides, explains how he believes nanotechnology could be about to revolutionize the world as we know it, eminent Marxist geographer David Harvey argues that capitalism is the primary driving force behind innovation. Award winning Indian author Radhika Jha weighs the options for one poor Indian village- trapped between tradition and the desire to leapfrog out of poverty.”

Listen here

“‘Capital is the lifeblood that flows through the body politic of all those societies we call capitalist, spreading out, sometimes as a trickle and other times as a flood, into every nook and cranny of the inhabited world’, writes David Harvey, the world’s most cited academic geographer. He gives Laurie a radical critique of what governs that flow of capital and what causes the crises which, he claims, will increasingly disrupt that flow with alarming rapidity. Modern economics has buried its head in detail but ignored the systematic character of capital flow, he claims, and it is time for a restore an understanding of how capital works.”

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“Aditya Chakrabortty discusses Goldman Sachs’ appearance before a Senate committee, President Obama’s banking reform failure, which British political party has the most convincing economic model, plus we ask Prof David Harvey whether the financial crisis predictable and necessary?”

Listen now:

Interview with David Harvey
(Alternate version with Portuguese subtitles)
October 9, 2009

David Harvey on Urban Utopias
MIT City Visions Course
Spring 2004

Some commentators view the current crisis as arising from problems in finance that then impinged on the wider economy; others see it as a result of issues that arose in production and then led to financial problems. How do you view it?

It’s a false dichotomy that’s being posed. There is a more dialectical relationship between what you might call the “real” and “financial” sides of the economy. There is no question that there has been an underlying problem of what I would call “over-accumulation” for a considerable time now. And in part the movement into investing in asset values rather than production is a consequence of that. But as the search for new forms of asset value developed you also saw financial innovation that created the possibility of investment in hedge funds and those sorts of things.

There was a long-term process in which the rich looked for reasonably high rates of return and began to invest in a whole series of Ponzi schemes – but without Bernard Madoff at the top. In the property market, stock market, art market and derivatives markets, the more people that invest, the more prices go up, which leads to even more people investing. All of those markets have a Ponzi character to them. So there is a financial aspect to the crisis but unless you ask why the most affluent were taking that path you miss out on the real problem.

Read the rest of the interview at the Socialist Review.

Part 1 of 3:

Part 2 of 3:

Part 3 of 3: