September 15, 2026
Figure 3: The Circulation of Labour Capacity
The course will run on Tuesdays from 4:15-6:15pm [ET] from September 8 – December 1, 2026. Register for the virtual course here.
Readings for next class: The Story of Capital Chapters 4 & 5.
September 8, 2026
Figure 1: Circulation of Capital
Figure 2: Path of Argument in Marx’s Capital v1
The course will run on Tuesdays from 4:15-6:15pm [ET] from September 8 – December 1, 2026. Register for the virtual course here.
We had some audio issues with this class, but hope to have them resolved for future classes.
Readings for next class: The Story of Capital: Preface, Chapters 1, 2, and 3
Join us for a public virtual livestream of Prof. David Harvey’s course The Story of Capital. The course entails a close reading of the recent book The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know about How Capital Works by David Harvey.
For decades, David Harvey has been teaching Marx’s work, particularly Capital, to great acclaim. He has analysed chapter by chapter – sometimes line-by-line – Marx’s three volumes and the Grundrisse. This new book opens up the mental universe of that work for a general reader.
In The Story of Capital, Harvey takes a synoptic approach to the conceptual architecture as a whole and guides us through the key moments, from labour and technology to the state and geopolitics, via the profit rate, social reproduction, the relationship to nature, fictitious capital and the return of the rentiers. In doing so, Harvey has produced a work which will become a key reference for all those trying to grasp the nature of contemporary capitalism.
The course will run on Tuesdays from 4:15-6:15pm [ET] from September 8 – December 1, 2026. Register for the virtual course here.
This is the 8th semester-long virtual course on Marx that Professor Harvey has made available for free. You can take any of those past courses here.
Doomscroll Podcast with Joshua Citarella
Whitney Museum of American Art
July 28, 2026
The Story of Capital is available now from Verso Books.
The Story of Capital connects the world of the academy and the world of the street protest.
By Max Holleran
The New Republic
July 27, 2026
For over a half century, David Harvey has been a central figure in Marxist debates around the future of capitalism. He is not a firebrand with a septum piercing, nor is he a holdover European radical in the mold of the political parties Podemos or La France Insoumise, for whom the spirit of 1968 never died. Rather, Harvey is an academic geographer who has been reading Karl Marx’s 1,200-page tome Capital (Das Kapital) with his students since the early 1970s, first at Johns Hopkins and then the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. For decades, this close reading was an exercise in scholarly perseverance for those striving to get a grip on the fine details of left political economy. But during the 2007–2008 economic crisis, that all changed: Harvey went from a noted academic to something akin to a Marxist prophet.
Andy Merrifield’s Roses for Gramsci, a highly personal history of the Italian thinker and his work, examines his influence across generations.
Book Review by Aditya Bahl
The Nation
June 3, 2026
Fifty years after Selections From the Prison Notebooks was first published in 1971, the joke remains popular: Antonio Gramsci is a communist you can bring home to your parents. It wouldn’t matter if they were liberals or Maoists, social democrats or anti-imperialists, populists or pacifists—everyone gets along with Antonio.
The reasons for Gramsci’s popularity, as well as his pliability, lie in the unique form of his oeuvre. His themes, for one, are startlingly capacious: serial novels and popular theater, factory councils and peasant estates, Catholicism and communism, newspaper design and comparative grammar, folklore and opera. There’s something here for everyone. At the same time, Gramsci’s prison writing—over 3,000 pages across 33 notebooks—is peppered with myriad “Aesopian” codes and terms. These ciphers were originally intended to confound Benito Mussolini’s Fascist censors, but their diffuse meanings have since triggered a series of heated polemics. And so, apart from attracting an unusually diverse readership, Gramsci’s work has also spawned diverse, frequently disparate, interpretations.
New article in Jacobin:
In Volume 1 of Capital, Karl Marx ventures the opinion that “classical political economy stumbles approximately onto the true state of affairs, but without consciously formulating it. It is unable to do this as long as it stays within its bourgeois skin.”
Marx and the bourgeois economists confront the same material realities, but they interpret, explain, and use them very differently. For example, both David Ricardo (the leading bourgeois figure in nineteenth-century political economy) and Marx considered capitalism to be a passing form of economic organization but for totally different reasons.
Both believed the profit rate on capital would ultimately fall to zero. Ricardo believed wages would have to rise to pay for the increasing cost of food grown on increasingly scarce and less fertile land. Rents would also rise because cultivable land would become increasingly scarce. Hence, rising wages and rising rents would squeeze profits until they fell to zero.
Marx proposes a very different explanation. Individual capitalists operating under the coercive laws of competition adopt technologies that increase labor productivity. The need for labor power is thereby reduced. But labor power is the source of all value and surplus value (profit). In the absence of any countervailing forces, the rate of surplus value (profit) culled from the exploitation of labor power tends to fall.
For many of us, David Harvey was our introduction to Marxism. Whether it was the seminal course on Capital that went viral after the recession, his famous books on postmodernism or neoliberalism, or the giant tomes introducing Marx’s major works—everyone had an entry point. In my case it was 2015 at the Birkbeck critical theory summer school. I attended Harvey’s lectures as a 20-something graduate student. Not only did they blow me away, but I was struck by his kindness, respect and availability. After the talks, Harvey would inevitably head upstairs to grab a few beers (more than a few for the younger crowd). He’d happily discuss, debate or explain the material as you wished it. Harvey was the true model of a left wing intellectual. Smart, vastly erudite and creative but always democratic, considerate and open to dialogue. And so he’s remained.
The Story of Capital makes a major contribution to Marxist theory and critical communication studies. Harvey offers a synthetic, lucid, and expansive account of capital’s totality. The book’s strengths are evident from its conceptual architecture. Harvey integrates production, circulation, realisation, technology, finance, fixed capital, social reproduction, extractivism, the rentier, and the state-finance nexus within one moving field. Apple, Google, Amazon, Musk, Silicon Valley, AI, Blackstone, central banks, higher education, and military research all appear inside the same theoretical horizon. That concreteness greatly enhances the book’s usefulness for communication scholars.
The book’s second major strength lies in its treatment of the state. Harvey integrates the economy and the state within a single moving field. Harvey shows how state functions inhabit the inner structure of accumulation and how financial governance, public debt, infrastructural investment, military competition, and territorial control enter capital’s very operation. This framework is especially valuable for media and digital analysis because communication infrastructures often sit at the intersection of state policy, military investment, research funding, and corporate platform expansion.
The third major strength lies in Harvey’s historical sensibility. Harvey consistently treats capital as geographically uneven, historically specific, and internally contradictory. This sensibility allows the book to move from Manchester to Shenzhen, from Venice to Silicon Valley, from the factory to the airport, from the university to the central bank. The communication analysis gains force because it appears inside this broader historical map.
Read the full review by John Bessai in Communication, Capitalism & Critique.
A League of Socialist Cities
David Harvey interviewed by Richard Hames for Novara Media’s new show, Do Your Own Research.
9 May 2026
 A Companion to Marx's GrundrisseVerso Books 2023 |
|
The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles 
Pluto Press2020 |
 A Companion To Marx's Capital: The Complete EditionVerso Books 2018 |
 Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic ReasonOxford University Press 2017 |
 The Ways of the WorldOxford University Press 2016 |
 Seventeen Contradictions and the End of CapitalismOxford University Press 2014 |
 A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 2
Verso 2013 |
 Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution Verso 2012 |
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