David Harvey
The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works
Verso Books, London, 2026. 400 pp., $34.95 hb
ISBN 9781836742111
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.
Academically, Harvey made his name developing Marxism as a theoretical paradigm within a very Kantian and positivist inflected geography. Harvey was fascinated by Marx’s descriptions of how seemingly alien historical processes recrafted the world around us; as Marx put it in the Grundrisse, bringing the globe closer together through the annihilation of space by time. Since then, Harvey’s contributions have been voluminous: countless papers, girthy books, lectures, critical primers, you name it. Some of these were highly speculative. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference dives into the philosophy of nature, dialoging with Heidegger, Whitehead and more on the ontology of reality itself. Some of them feel ripped from the headlines. A Brief History of Neoliberalism has become a classic critical introduction to the topic, following Marx in making clear how economics is about a lot more than just economics.
Then there are Harvey’s major works of Marxology: the Companion to Marx’s Capital and Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse. Marxists tend to be a prickly bunch, especially about the maestro’s work and how to interpret it. It’s hard to think of anyone who buys into Harvey’s reading wholesale. But it’s also hard to think of anyone who has engaged Marx as thoroughly as Harvey does.
Harvey’s recent book, The Story of Capital, reads very much like a coda to his reconstruction, what he calls the ‘Marx project’ in the preface (ix). Where the earlier companions dive deep into specific books, the goal of The Story of Capital is summative. Harvey argues that ‘capital’s totality is an organic system in perpetual evolution.’ (3) The goal is to understand this totality in all its moving and changing parts, and above all else the relations between them. This is a key point Harvey has been stressing since at least Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. He points out that Marx, following Hegel, doesn’t understand social causality the way a bourgeois philosopher might. It’s not the case that A causes B which in turn leads to C. This aligns with a natural and social ontology that starts from perceiving the world as a collection of separate individuals and then describes social laws as an emergent feature. By contrast, Marx’s view of causality is relational and mutual. A effects B and is recursively effected in turn. Consider an extending root structure which draws nutrients from the earth and air, while in turn reshaping the soil structure and atmosphere as it grows into a tree. It is a holistic ontology. Moreover, over time this relationship itself can become independently impactful through alienation, which leads to reification.
Harvey points out that Marx applied these dialectical considerations to capitalism. For Marx,
[the] totality of capital’s inner structure exists within [the] much broader totality of capitalism as a social formation. Marx’s reason for conceptualizing this distinction between mode of production and social formation is that he sees the mode of capital’s production as the economic engine, the foundational powerhouse, the source of abstract forces, to which all of us who live under the regime of capital are willy-nilly obligated. (13)
But where Hegel’s idealist ontology was conceived to be infinite and absolute, Marx continuously stresses the all too human finitude and contingency of our social totality. This doesn’t mean it is closed off from the infinitude of nature. Harvey points out there are methodological questions one must ask about when it makes sense to consider the social totality independently of nature, much as a doctor might consider the human body ‘as a working totality for purposes of medical investigation.’ (17). Harvey doesn’t solve this problem, and it is probably irresolvable for any social scientific investigation.
The bulk of the book is taken up by following Marx in creating a ‘mental map’ of capital. This means abstracting moments of the social totality out from their broader place within the system to investigate them independently, before refitting them into the bigger picture. To go back to the medical analogy, one can’t understand the heart without looking at circulation, and beyond that neurology, etc. But that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to abstractly examine the ventricles of the heart independently for a while to gain a more granular understanding.
The Story of Capital canvasses a vast number of such abstracted moments. The history of capitalist dispossession is given a thoughtful chapter that fleshes out the relationship between capitalism, the state and violence. One insight Harvey offers is that the dialectical relationship between capital, the state and coercion is a fluid one that can change the configuration of capital at any given time. For example, bankers and merchants can ‘exploit their position in the circulation of capital to accumulate capital on their own account’ and bend the legal system to facilitate their rise. In those circumstances, the productive sphere of capitalism can become less significant. If the ‘credit system is flagrantly used to bolster the wealth and power of the investment bankers (such as Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan) or speculative property companies (like Blackstone), instead of supporting value and surplus value production, the theory of capital circulation and accumulation needs extensive revision’ (266). This seems a worthwhile point to ponder in a context where most Americans claim to be struggling just to make ends meet and GDP growth is stagnant, and yet the stock market continues to do well.
The chapter ‘The Production of Space, Time and Place’ is naturally a winner, returning to topics Harvey has weighed in on since the 1970s. Harvey continues to stress how capital is in a constant race to compress space through time, pushing technological dynamism especially in fields like transportation and communication. Relative ‘space-times are perpetually shifting because of technological changes in the ability to traverse space in less and less time. While it took several weeks for the news of George Washington’s death in Mount Vernon in Virginia to get to Ohio, such an event would be known within minutes via cable news today’ (145). Harvey is also uniquely interested in place and geography as a means of pursuing an emancipatory socialist project. This has always been one of the more interesting, and practical dimensions of his thought. Most of us tend to think of systemic, intellectualized ways of moving past the capitalist mode of production. Harvey has always thought that we’ll know socialism by the new kinds of neighborhoods and cities it creates.
The struggles over what kind of place we inhabit and what kind of people we want to be is a form of general political and social struggle that is central to what socialist consciousness must embrace. It is oppositional to the alienated and exclusionary nationalism that frequently attaches to the toxic form of developmentalism that too often corrupts anticapitalist politics. (156)
Far from writing more recipe books for the cook shops of the future, let alone criticizing the critical critics, Harvey’s imperative here is to think through the kind of very practical (dare I say wonkish?) questions socialist theorists usually avoid. We need to see the inner radicalness in street and interior design. This seems unusually poignant right now when for the first time in years, a self-described socialist mayor is in charge of one of the world’s major metropolis and has committed to building a city for all New Yorkers.
If there is anything dissatisfying about Harvey’s book its how incomplete it feels. There are many moments throughout when he calls for further study, recommends interrogating this or that problem more thoroughly, or suggests theorizing a problem that’s unresolved. Sometimes it leaves the book feeling a bit like a fleshed-out research proposal. At the same time, it’s a testament to Harvey intellectual honesty that he refuses to hypostasize closure where there is none. More to the point, it seems to me that Marxism itself as a materialist philosophy precludes such resolution. There is no terminus point for understanding the social totality, because it is ever changing. This has always struck me as the odd thing about very dogmatic Marxists. Marx himself was anything but dogmatic, constantly changing his views over time. And this was appropriate when studying a system that by his own account was the most transformative, dynamic and potentially destructive the world has yet seen. Harvey has clearly internalized this sensibility and that’s an honorable position to take.
The Story of Capital ends on a surprisingly serene, even modest note, with a short text on Pierro Sraffa. At the conclusion, Harvey reminisces about his life:
So here I am, in my ninetieth year, looking back on my career as a geographer interested in explaining, with a little help from Marx, how urbanization and uneven development work, finding myself obliged to some extraordinary scholars, such as Sraffa and Robinson; and to people, events and political currents that open doors to new ways of thinking, hopefully more adequate to confront the central contradictions of our times. It is, however, one thing to open doors but quite enough to pass through en masse, to explore what might exist on the other side. The American empire that has sheltered capital for so long is starting to crack. This is a moment of opportunity as well as of peril. A little bit of optimism of the intellect is called for, if only to jump-start the optimism of the will. (361)
I have to admit that I was deeply touched by this because of how deeply Harvey has touched many of our lives. Everyone has their arguments and disagreements with him. I remember him getting into prickly debates with countless feminists, post-modernists and Hegelians over that halcyon summer in Birbeck. My future wife and I previewed many of our later debates sparring over which of his positions were right and wrong. But looking back, I can say that what Harvey gave every leftist in the room was a bit of that optimism of the intellect to jump start our optimism of the will. He made us think a better world was possible. There’s no higher honor for a Marxist intellectual.
Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Spelman College and the author of The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, amongst other books.