A Companion to Marx's Capital

by David Harvey

Book Overview

"My aim is to get you to read a book by Karl Marx called Capital, Volume 1 , and to read it on Marx's own terms..." The biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression has generated a surge of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1844673596
• ISBN13: 9781844673599
• Release Date: March 2010
• Publisher: Verso
• Length: 356 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Marx as critical analyst

The text is informative but a bit preachy. I suggested long ago in my dissertation that Marx was of enormous value as an analyst of what was wrong with the capitalistic system but a bit starstruck when he projected the outcome of the industrial revolution. For all that, any serious text on Capital is welcome. The author wastes too many words pushing his reader to read the real thing. I hope, albeit fondly, that out there lurk would be scholars who wish to tackle the works of Smith, Marx, Schumpeter and Keynes. I fear, however, that they may be trampled underfoot by the crowd which has no time to dwell on musings from the past.

A very rich and stimulating book

Although well into it, I have not yet finished my study of this wonderful exposition of and commentary on vol. 1 of Marx's CAPITAL, which have indeed motivated me to restudy the three volumes of Marx's great masterpiece. Among the many good things in Harvey's book are his various discussions of dialectic, especially in his chapter 7, "What Technology Reveals". In this chapter Harvey unpacks Marx's footnote 4 in chapter 15 of Cap., v. 1. I can do no better than quote Harvey. Harvey sees the second part of this footnote as constituting an important statement that requires elaboration--and here you will see how helpful Harvey can be in helping us to approach and gain the work of Marx. He cites Marx's statement: "Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations." (It seems that one cannot gloss over anything in Marx: one must pay close attention to everything.) Here is part of Harvey's commentary on this quotation. "Marx here links in one sentence six identifiable conceptual elements. There is, first of all, technology. There is the relation to nature. There is the actual process of production and then, in rather shadowy form, the production and reproduction of daily life. There are social relations and mental conceptions. These elements are plainly not static but in motion, linked through 'processes of production' that guide human evolution. The only element he doesn't explicitly describe in production terms is the relation to nature. Obviously, the relation to nature has been evolving over time. The idea that nature is also something continuously in the course of being produced in part through human action has also been long-standing; in its Marxist version (outlined in chapter 7), it is best represented in my colleague Neil Smith's book UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT, where capitalist processes of production of nature and of space are explicitly theorized. "How, then, are we to construe the relationships between these six conceptual elements? Though his language is suggestive, Marx leaves the question open, which is unfortunate since it leaves lots of space for all manner of interpretations. Marx is often depicted, by both friends and foes alike, as a technological determinist, who thinks changes in the productive forces dictate the course of human history, including the evolution of social relations, mental conceptions, the relation to nature and the like.... "I do not share this interpretation. I find it inconsistent with Marx's dialectical method (dismissed by analytic philosophers such as Cohen as rubbish). Marx generally eschews causal language (I defy you to find much of it in CAPITAL). In this footnote, he does not say technology 'causes' or 'determines," but that technology 'reveals' or, in another translation, 'discloses' the relati

More than Worthwhile If Flawed Companion To Marx

Harvey's "Companion," is an excellent presentation of Marx's "Capital" and more than worth the effort to read it side by side with the original. Coupled with, say, Ernst Fischer's, "How To Read Karl Marx," and "Marx for Beginners," it might even a good text to read before plowing into Marx himself. However, the reader should keep in mind that Harvey is a liberal. His Marxism virtually abandons the core of Marx's analysis and philosophy: Revolution. Harvey, after all, makes a baseless call for a "New" New Deal in another recent work. Why? Perhaps because Harvey is weak on the study of imperialism, even though his references to Luxemburg are on point, and he's therefore unable to fully address the necessity of capital's crises (losing wars, financial collapse, etc) and the existing choke points of capital's weaknesses. He suggests that the world's "dispossessed" may be key, perhaps linked to the working classes. That's a pretty easy call, but it misses local realities as in the US, where the working class is de-industrialized, nearly gone, the unions unable to meet the challenges at hand (structural failures, corrupt, incompetent and sold out) while few organizations of the US dispossessed have ever lasted long. Schools are now the central organizing point of life in many nations. In any case, a more careful, Marxist, analysis of concrete conditions would have served Harvey better. Nevertheless, I am happy to have read the work (track the role of commodity fetishism) and am sure any curious reader will be too.

Excellent companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 1

David Harvey is not just one of the world's foremost social and economic geographers, but is also one of the world's foremost Marx interpreters. "A Companion to Marx's Capital" is the book form of a series of lectures on Capital, Volume 1, that he has annually held with his college students and which has famously been made available publicly in video format (he is currently fundraising for volume 2). Because of this, the book is not just only about Volume 1, but it is also written to be as accessible to a general public as possible. Moreover, it seeks only to explain, not to defend. Sometimes, this does lead to trouble - Harvey does not entirely seem to grasp that to explain the way a certain figure thought about a topic also means you have to show what arguments he himself would have used to defend his perspective, and when Harvey tries to substitute his own arguments for those of Marx, they are often not the more convincing for it. The book is somewhat weak on making the entirety seem convincing for that reason, but that is something easily solved by referring to his excellent other work, "The Limits to Capital" (The Limits to Capital (New and updated edition). That said, the book is a systematic, clear and engaging explanation of the work, built on a chapter-by-chapter approach. Harvey recommends, especially for the difficult and abstract first chapters, to have a copy of Marx's "Capital", Vol. 1, with you while reading it - the Penguin edition is generally recommended (Capital: Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy (Penguin Classics)). This is justified also because Marx himself, as Harvey shows, builds up his argument from chapter to chapter, both in terms of introducing ever new and more complicated concepts building on the old, and in terms of showing bit by bit what the contradictions in capitalism are and how capitalism unfolds as a result. Marx's approach is thoroughly steeped in a dynamic analysis which sees movement as the result of a clash of contradictions, in the tradition of Hegel in particular. Harvey does a deft job of explaining what this is and how it works out in the course of Marx's book. There are of course points where one can have disagreements with Harvey's explanations, and I think at a few points this is warranted. He fails entirely to point out the actual analytical benefits of a value theory as opposed to just a price theory in his discussion of the chapter on money. Because the 'labor theory of value' is an absolutely essential and inalienable part of Marxist analysis, this is a serious problem. He does not explain the relation between industrial and financial capital very well in the chapter on capital and labor power (which he does do in his other major work). Finally, he does not give Marx's statements on the relation between 'historical and moral factors' as well as productivity to value and its flows the full attention it deserves, although admittedly that would reach fairly far for what is to be a basic