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.
