The Ways of the World; Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason

David Harvey. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016. viii and 376 pp., photos, diagrams, bibliography, index. $27.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-19-046944-3).

David Harvey. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv and 236 pp., diagrams, bibliography, index. $24.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-19-069148-6).

For half a century David Harvey has been at the center of debates within human geography. From his Explanation in Geography (Harvey 1969), which served as a veritable Bible for a generation or more of positivist thinkers but which Harvey himself rejected virtually from the moment of its parturition, to his efforts to spatialize Marx and to Marxify geography since, Harvey has been both highly productive and provocative in providing insights into how capitalism operates. These, his two most recent books, continue this tradition. Neither disappoints, as both are excellent reads. Certainly, inevitably both books cover some similar ground—the crisis-prone nature of capitalism, the geographical expression thereof, and calls for creating a different way of organizing human social existence. At the same time, though, they are quite different in structure and scope and complement one another well.

Beginning with The Ways of the World, this book provides a smorgasbord of some of Harvey's works over the years. Although each chapter is a hearty meal in its own right and can be read and enjoyed independently of the others, taken as a collectivity they also allow the reader to trace the trajectory of Harvey's thoughts over the past several decades to see how his thinking has developed. Starting with his “Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary Theory in Geography and the Problem of Ghetto Formation” (originally published in Antipode), which argued against positivist notions that ideas are “value neutral” and instead that there is a politics to knowledge and that this politics is crucial in shaping how we understand the world and come to engage with it, the book explores several aspects of how capitalism functions and how we might theorize its dynamics. Hence, the next two chapters—“The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation” and “The Urban Process under Capitalism”—speak to one another as Harvey outlines a way to build on the (limited) spatial theorizing engaged in by Marx and why the production of the built environment (what he calls the “secondary circuit of capital”)—and hence the geography of urbanization—is so central to capitalism's dynamics. The following chapter, on Paris and the building of the Sacré Cœur Basilica to expiate for the “sins” of the Commune, represents a change of pace, being more historical in nature.

“Time-Space Compression and the Postmodern Condition” from Harvey's (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity is a chapter wherein he argues that technological and social transformations in how time and space are both constituted and perceived have led to the growth of a new social consciousness—expressed in fields such as art, architecture, literature, and others—that has gone under the broad moniker of postmodernism. With parallels to similar transformations in thought spawned by technological and social developments at the end of the nineteenth century (as brilliantly detailed in Kern's [1983] The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918), Harvey suggested that there is an underlying materiality to the new cultural feelings that came to challenge the Modernist ways of living and perceiving that had dominated much of the earlier twentieth century and that had been associated with Fordist ways of organizing the economy. As someone old enough to remember the flood of arguments concerning postmodernism that deluged geographical thinking in the 1980s and 1990s, I can attest to the reactions among geographers provoked by Harvey's contention—some (mostly Marxists) found his argument compelling, whereas others (many former Marxists turned cultural studies types) found it merely infuriating. Either way, his central claim in The Condition of Postmodernity was provocative and brought geographers into conversations beyond the discipline. Although many geographers were already familiar with Harvey's arguments about the nature of capitalism but less so with the tenets of literary theory and cultural studies, many scholars of the latter were intrigued by arguments concerning the production of space and “thinking geographically” (and, especially, efforts to use Marx to do so).

In Chapter 6, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism,” Harvey suggests that the local state in many places has increasingly been transformed from an entity designed to ensure access to public goods on an equitable basis to a boosterist, growth-at-any-cost entity in which access to public goods is increasingly dictated by one's ability to pay, a conversion he links to broader changes within the nature of capitalism (e.g., the deindustrialization of many former manufacturing hubs, growing global competition, and the rise of supply-side economic thinking, among other forces). This, in turn, has had—and is having—implications for workers, who are now increasingly told that they must be less militant and acquiesce to “economic realities” for fear that circulating capital might choose to locate in communities other than their own. Following from this, Harvey shifts to a discussion of “The Nature of Environment” in which he seeks to integrate understandings of nature into theorizing about capitalist development. Certainly, Harvey's argument that Marxists need to theorize how nature, like space, is produced under capitalism (and other forms of social organization) is very much on point. To be honest, though, this was the one chapter that I had a hard time getting into, perhaps because here Harvey was working out his own ideas with regard to nature.

Chapter 8, “Militant Particularism and Global Ambition,” is partly autobiographical. Harvey draws on the work of Raymond Williams as he recounts the story of conflicting strategies proposed by a number of scholars—Harvey among them—involved in trying to oppose the closure of the Rover car plant in Oxford, where he had recently moved to take up the University's Halford Mackinder Professorship. A key question concerned what we could call “the politics of geographical scale,” especially how (or even whether) to connect the particularities of place to broader flows and processes.

If Chapter 8 focuses largely on the ins and outs of a struggle in a particular place (Oxford), then Chapter 9 (“The ‘New’ Imperialism”) is much more global in scope. In this chapter, Harvey details what he calls “accumulation by dispossession,” or how wealth is being concentrated in the hands of the few through dispossessing others of their wealth, land, or both. More specifically, he argues that contemporary capitalism has become reliant on large-scale theft of resources and money by the already powerful because more traditional forms of accumulation through expanded capital reproduction have been made problematic. These include ongoing crises of overaccumulation and the failure of various capitalist classes to manage such crises through new spatiotemporal fixes (i.e., to reorganize the economic landscape) in the ways in which they had managed to do for much of the twentieth century. This has manifested itself in what some call “the new imperialism”—although, to me, land grabbing in Iraq and elsewhere do not seem so very new—or the politics of austerity, in which wealth is transferred from the poor to the wealthy.

The book's penultimate chapter (“The Urban Roots of Financial Crises”) explores the connections between crisis within the capitalist system as a whole and urban crisis specifically. Harvey challenges what he sees as “conventional” economic accounts that typically treat developments in the built environment as secondary to developments in the “national economy.” Here Harvey returns to the theoretical framework he had laid out in the 1970s and alludes to how investment in the secondary circuit of capital can be made as an effort to solve crises in the primary circuit. In particular, he links crises of overaccumulation in the United States in the 1990s to a growing housing bubble, as speculators looked for places to park their money, and, when this bubble burst in 2007, to the construction boom in China, a boom that has been nothing short of remarkable. One measure of this is the fact that whereas the United States used 4.5 billion tons of cement between 1900 and 1999, China used 6.5 billion between just 2011 and 2013 (Smil 2013). This raises the matter of how struggles over housing and who bears the burden of urban crisis are linked into broader anticapitalist struggles and a “right to the city.”

In the final chapter, “Capital Evolves,” Harvey seeks to bring things together by looking at what he identifies as seven “activity spheres” (e.g., the production of new technological and organizational forms within society, the labor process, and the relation to nature), how they relate to one another, and how their relationships with one another are mediated by sets of institutional arrangements (e.g., market relations) and administrative structures (e.g., the state), which, in turn, develop within the broader context of capitalist political economies (working differently in different parts of the planet). The fact that the relationships between these spheres are not necessarily harmonious and that they play out unevenly across space provides a way both to view capitalism as a deeply spatially structured phenomenon, but also to explore openings that might appear, or can be constructed for organizing social life differently.

Overall, The Ways of the World is a good selection of some of the key issues with which Harvey has grappled over his career, addressing a range of topics from the sociology of knowledge, to how to theorize capitalism as a geographical entity, to understanding connections between imperialism and crises of overaccumulation, to the role of urbanization as a sink for overaccumulated capital, to the history of urban struggles in Second Empire France. Certainly, one could track down each of the individual chapters in the places in which they originally appeared. One of the nice things about this collection, though, is that each chapter has a commentary situating it historically in Harvey's thinking, outlining what he was trying to do with it, how it was received, and how it relates to his other works. I had read several of these chapters before—many a number of times—and have taught using them, in both undergraduate classes and graduate-level ones. Although all offer interesting insights on various aspects of capitalist development, I consistently found the most interesting to be those that help us to theorize how capitalism is deeply geographically structured—that is to say, how capitalism shapes the structure of landscapes and how the structure of landscapes shapes capitalism.

For me one of the more provocative points of the book is Harvey's short (pp. 172–74) recounting of Marx's fascination with Darwin. As someone who taught a philosophy of science and sociology of knowledge class to graduate students for over two decades, one that emphasized the social context of the production of scientific knowledge, I found particularly interesting Marx's observation that Darwin's adapting Malthus's arguments about organisms competing with one another in response to population pressures on limited land and resources, together with Darwin's own understanding of English competitive class relations under industrial capitalism, led Russian biologists—who came from a sparsely populated land where monarchism and socialist-populism generated a more cooperative ethos—to largely reject his evolutionary mechanism. Instead, they favored a view of evolution involving more cooperative relations and mutual aid exemplified by geographer-anarchist Kropotkin's (1902) Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Marx's point, then, was that Darwin's view of evolution was molded by his geographical context and that this shaped his materialist theory of nature, which Marx saw as the yin to the yang of his own materialist theory of history and social development. Whether it crossed Marx's mind that his own theories might have been influenced by his own personal geography is an open question, but I cannot help but wonder how his analysis of class struggle might have been different had he been a German living in exile in Moscow rather than in London.

If The Ways of the World represents a retrospective survey of Harvey's work over a lifetime, then Marx, Capital, and the Madness of Economic Reason is quite different. Not a collection of previously published pieces—although it draws on ideas Harvey has been exploring for several decades—it is an effort to work through specific concepts in Marx as a way to understand contemporary economic issues. Whereas many economists have suggested that Marx is no longer relevant because he is dated and society has moved on since the 1860s, Harvey suggests, au contraire, that Marx's analysis is all the more relevant today because capitalism has become so much more geographically widespread than it was in Marx's day. Marx's writing can be opaque, however, to the point where it is difficult to decipher what he meant. Therefore, Harvey's goal in this book is to lay out several of Marx's key concepts and illustrate how they fit together. This serves largely as a pedagogical tool and reflects Harvey's experiences of teaching Capital for many years and dealing with perplexed looks on students' faces.

The book features a brief prologue, nine chapters, and a short coda. The first chapter presents a means to visualize capital as value in motion. Drawing on the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, Harvey starts off with an image of the hydrological cycle as a way to understand the many different forms in which water can exist within the totality of the system, suggesting that this can serve as a useful analogy to understand the different forms that capital can take.

Recognizing the limitations of using the hydrological cycle as a model of capital circulation, Harvey then proceeds to explore what is meant by “value” and to show how capital can be manifested in different forms (much as “precipitation occurs in many different forms” [p. 20]), forms that frequently are at odds with one another. One important point that Harvey makes is to remember that workers are not just involved in the circulation of capital in the realm of production, but also in the realm of consumption in their role as purchasers of goods and services. This means that workers, not just through their actions in the realm of surplus value generation but also through their consumer choices, are active social agents who shape the circulation of capital both within and without the workplace, a recognition that allows for less capital-centric analyses of capitalism and provides a mechanism for thinking about how the politics of consumption need to be considered if we are to develop strategies to challenge capitalism.

Having outlined a way to visualize capital in motion, Harvey then turns to the three volumes of Marx's magnum opus, Capital. The chapter is pretty straightforward, with Harvey arguing, in echoes of the previous chapter, that each of the volumes provides different insights into the totality of capital circulation and, hence, that there can be different entry points into disrupting this circulation, from interventions in the realm of production to those in the realm of consumption, distribution, market regulation, the banking system, and so forth. More important, he suggests, prioritizing the extraction of surplus value (as articulated in Volume 1) over questions of the realization and distribution of capital (as articulated in Volumes 2 and 3) can lead to serious error. Rather, each volume should be read as providing a slightly different perspective on capital as a totality, with each aspect of capital (its production, realization, and distribution) presupposing and prefiguring the others. Harvey then proceeds to look at money (the universal form of value) and to explain how it relates to value, seeing money and value as autonomous and independent of one another, but also as dialectically intertwined. An important point here is the difference in Marxist and neoclassical approaches to money and value. Whereas for Marxists value is measured in socially necessary labor time and price is a measure of what I have to pay to buy something in the marketplace (a formulation that leads to the [in]famous “transformation problem”), for neoclassical economists a commodity's value is measured by its price—a formulation that avoids the transformation problem but also largely disconnects commodities from the labor involved in their production. In my own teaching, I have found that one measure of how profoundly the neoclassical approach has been accepted is that my students sometimes have a hard time understanding the difference between value and price, at least as understood by classical economists like Marx, and so Harvey's chapter will be useful in this regard.

After discussing the relationship between value and money, Harvey then moves on to consider the relationship between value and what he calls “anti-value.” Using the analogy of physics and how an understanding of the universe requires comprehending the connection between matter and anti-matter, Harvey argues that value and its negation—anti-value—are intimately coupled. Given that capital is value in motion, any time that value is not in motion (i.e., it is at rest) it becomes anti-value. This becomes relevant to understanding crises of capitalist accumulation as, for instance, unsold commodities become anti-value that can effectively consume the value held within them, which is not realized in the marketplace. Likewise, debt is a form of anti-value because it is a demand on future value. As Harvey puts it, “Any failure to maintain a certain velocity of circulation of capital through the various phases of production, realisation and distribution will produce difficulties and disruptions [as any] slowdown in value in motion entails a loss of value” (p. 74), and, hence, the creation of anti-value. The result is that capitalists are “locked in a perpetual battle not only to produce values but to combat their potential negation” (p. 75). Harvey uses this concept to outline a theory of crisis, but it also opens opportunities to consider how the geography of capitalism can enable or constrain the production of both value and anti-value—poor infrastructure could slow down the swiftness with which the value in commodities can be realized, whereas a new road system might speed it up.

Through the concept of anti-value, then, Harvey provides a mechanism to connect myriad things that might at first seem unconnected to the potential for crisis—poorly designed landscapes (at least from the perspective of ensuring fast turnover times for capital), the accumulation of debt, workers striking (and therefore halting the circulation of capital), consumer boycotts (which prevent the value in commodities being realized), and so forth. Personally, I found the concept of anti-value to be an interesting one that does provide a way to link these various actions that, at first glance, seem unconnected, although it was a difficult one to grasp (and, to be honest, I am not sure still that I fully comprehend all of the nuances Harvey brings to the analysis).

Picking up on the issue of the relationship between money and value discussed in Chapter 3, in Chapter 5 Harvey returns to the question of the relationship between value and price by discussing things that have prices but not values. There are several reasons, I assume, that he included this chapter, but one of them is probably because it provides a way to have nature enter the picture, given that the Earth's natural resources can join the capital circulation process as, initially, “free gifts” that have a price but no value (i.e., no labor incorporated within them, although they might require some degree of human labor to access, such as iron ore that must be dug out of the ground before it can be used). Likewise, the products of nonwaged labor, such as peasant production or household labor, can also be “free gifts” to capital.

Not only does this recognition provide an entrée for considering how capitalist economies are made up of both capitalist and noncapitalist work processes (a recognition that has shades of the kind of analysis presented by Gibson-Graham [1996]), but it also allows for an appreciation of the fact that the nature of work within capitalist economies is being transformed by the rise of a gig economy and digital labor practices wherein many workers are no longer waged laborers but are now independent contractors, even if they are more precariously employed than traditional waged laborers—that is to say, it raises the question about how workers who were previously subject to capital's real subsumption (maybe when they were factory workers) but who have been laid off and are at present making ends meet in some kind of gig activity are now subject only to formal subsumption by capital.

Chapter 6 explores the role of technology for the dynamics of capitalism, detailing how technological innovation can stimulate competition (and vice versa) and how technology can be implicated in the deskilling of labor—which can itself spawn resistance and has done so since the early days of the industrial revolution when weavers threw their wooden sabots into the new-fangled machinery that they were facing in an effort to gum up their works. Here, too, is an opportunity to think geographically about capital in motion, as the introduction of technology is not only spatially uneven, but has implications for how the landscape is created and therefore how capital remains in motion—new technologies can shrink distances between points of production and places of consumption, for instance. In this chapter Harvey makes (at least) two important points. The first is that there is a paradox at play with regard to the adoption of new machinery and technologies in the production process, namely that although machines themselves do not create value—that can only come from human labor—they can nevertheless raise labor's productivity, thereby producing greater quantities of surplus value for capitalists even as the amount of value produced within the production process remains constant. Second, and relatedly, the role of technological innovation, Harvey argues, is to increase the amount of surplus value extracted by capitalists and not to ease the burden of workers' toil—any lightening of their labor is simply a fortuitous by-product. This means that rather than the utopian future imagined by some, in which machines do all the work and workers laze around enjoying the fruits of such technology, we are likely to see a dystopian one in which capitalists reap the benefits of technology and workers are thrown out into the street. Moreover, this dystopian future does not seem that far off—in China, now the world's largest market for industrial robots, the city of Dongguan's ominously named “Robot Replace Human” program aims to have completely automated hundreds of factories by 2020.

Having addressed technology, Harvey then turns to questions of time and space, asking what, if capital is value in motion, shapes how it moves (e.g., how does the form of the built environment facilitate capital mobility in some directions and not others?). This, of course, provides another opportunity to think about how the geography of capitalism is made and how the spatiality of the landscape can either enable or constrain capital accumulation. Hence, when Marx talks about fixed capital, he is talking about how capital drops out of circulation for a time. This means that such capital is fixed in space, too, though. This discussion of time and space, then, allows us to see how there is a tension and contradiction at the heart of the making of the geography of capitalism between, on the one hand, the need for capital to be fixed in place so that accumulation can occur, and the need, on the other, for capital to remain mobile, so that it can seek out new opportunities elsewhere. This geographical tension has a temporal element within it, as capital's need for spatial fixity typically involves it being invested in particular places for an expanded period of time. In an additional interesting observation, one drawing on the work of Massimiliano Tomba, Stavros Tombazos, and Daniel Bensaïd, Harvey also details how the three volumes of Capital rely on different notions of time—Volume 1 views time in a largely linear fashion, and Volume 2 does so in a largely cyclical fashion, whereas Volume 3 represents a kind of synthesis of the two and views time in a largely spiral fashion.

The book's penultimate chapter—“The Production of Value Regimes”—explores what we might call value's space–time constitution, a conceptual terrain that, Harvey avers, Marxists have used little ink on interrogating (except when seeking to theorize imperialism). Here, too, there is an implicit geographical tension at play, between the universalizing tendencies of the law of value on the one hand, and the particularities of various “value regimes” on the other. These latter exist as a result of geographical variations in, for instance, the intensity of the labor process, the distribution of the “free gifts” supplied by nature, the degree of spatial access to a place (itself the result, partly, of the structure of the naturally given landscape and partly the result of how humans have constructed the built environment, ensuring access to some parts of it and perhaps guaranteeing that other parts remain more isolated), and so forth. Significantly, although many have assumed that the universalizing tendencies of the law of value to even out rates of profit across the landscape will eventually leave us with a uniform profit surface across the globe, as Harvey (1982, 390) brilliantly showed in The Limits to Capital, such a landscape is actually impossible to create under capitalism, as there are always countervailing tendencies to this universalization at play. Thus, he noted, whereas the models of spatial economic equilibrium developed by theorists like Lösch (1954) assume that no individual capitalist can gain any advantage by moving somewhere else and so such landscapes are therefore ultimately undynamic, in actuality the constant pressure on capitalists to innovate as a way to increase their own profit rate vis-à-vis the social average means that a uniform profit surface can never develop and there will always be dynamism at work in the built environment. To gain an advantage over their rivals, for instance, capitalists will innovate in place, thereby increasing their own profitability relative to their competitors and producing a surface of uneven and constantly varying profitability. Consequently, some places will always have higher profit rates than do others, even as they might quickly lose their advantage as capitalists in other places also innovate to catch up or relocate to those places now enjoying higher profit rates. The world's future will not be, then, as Friedman (2005) erroneously imagined, flat but, rather, deeply unevenly developed, with such unevenness see-sawing back and forth across the landscape.

Chapter 9 (“The Madness of Economic Reason”) serves as the book's denouement, bringing everything together to lay out a dystopian future for the planet. In particular, Harvey looks at the rise of debt around the globe as a way to manage economic crisis. Much of this debt is related to the need to finance construction of the built environment as a way to soak up surpluses of capital and of labor to push crises into the future—a solution that has led to the phenomenal building boom in China. In turn, this boom is resulting in massive use of the planet's natural resources, together with colossal production of carbon dioxide, as fossil fuels are burned to provide the energy needed for such construction and the consumption it spawns. In China, for instance, official figures (which might well be an undercount) show that coal consumption jumped nearly threefold between 2002 and 2015, from approximately 1.5 billion tons to 4.0 billion, and between 2005 and 2011 the country added roughly two 600-megawatt coal plants a week (Larson 2014). Certainly, China is not solely responsible for such a dystopian future—as Harvey points out, part of the reason for China's having embarked on the strategy of trying to build its way out of crisis has been because of the way in which the country has been imbricated into the world economy and the knock-on effects of the U.S. housing crisis that emerged in 2007. As Myllyvirta (2018) noted, however, “China's economic policy has been the key driver of global emissions for the past two decades, with repeated rounds of debt stimulus [largely to build cities in which few people live] and withdrawal leading to record increases in emissions in 2008–12, and a rebound in 2017–18, with a period of falling emissions in between.”

In sum, these two books work well together. Although one is a retrospective and the other focuses more on understanding the contemporary aspects of crisis within the global capitalist system, there are multiple points of intersection between them, which is perhaps not surprising. For anyone wanting to understand our contemporary world, though, both are invaluable reads.