I have spent my life interpreting capitalism in order to build an alternative
By David Harvey
In November 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis, Queen Elizabeth visited the London School of Economics. In the course of this visit she asked the assembled economists why they had not seen the financial crisis coming. Not having any immediate answers, the economists consulted and ran seminars. Six months later they sent a collective letter to Her Majesty explaining that some mix of hubris and failure to confront systemic risks lay at the root of their failures. Neglecting systemic risks appears particularly egregious. Most of us would not choose to board an airplane that had not been checked for systemic risks.
My new book, The Story of Capital, seeks to interrogate the internal malfunctions and systemic risks within capital’s mode of production, but it does so with the aid of rather special theoretical tools drawn from Marx’s work on the political economy of capital. While Marx famously proclaimed that our aim should not be to understand the world but to change it, he put an enormous amount of time and effort into understanding that which he sought to change. Indeed, his practice suggests that he believed it vital to understand capital in order to change it.
