David Harvey tackles Marx's notebooks that have spawned wide-ranging and raging controversies
When leading scholar of Marx, Roman Rosdolsky, first encountered the virtually unknown text of Marx's Grundrisse-his preparatory work for his masterpiece Das Capital-in the 1950s in New York Public Library, he recognized it as 'a work of fundamental importance,' but declared 'its unusual form' and 'obscure manner of expression, made it far from suitable for reaching a wide circle of readers.'
David Harvey's Companion to Marx's Grundrisse builds upon his widely acclaimed companions to the first and second volumes of Capital in a way that will reach as wide an audience as possible. Marx's stated ambition for this text is to reveal 'the exact development of the concept of capital as the fundamental concept of modern economics, just as capital itself is the foundation of bourgeois society.'
While respecting Marx's desire to 'bring out all the contradictions of bourgeois production, as well as the boundary where it drives beyond itself,' David Harvey also pithily illustrates the relevance of Marx's text to understanding the troubled state of contemporary capitalism.
To modern Western society, capitalism is the air we breathe, and most people rarely think to question it, for good or for ill. But knowing what makes capitalism work-and what makes it fail-is crucial to understanding its long-term health, and the vast implications for the global economy that go along with it.
In Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, the eminent scholar David Harvey, author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism, examines the internal contradictions within the flow of capital that have precipitated recent crises. He contends that while the contradictions have made capitalism flexible and resilient, they also contain the seeds of systemic catastrophe. Many of the contradictions are manageable, but some are fatal: the stress on endless compound growth, the necessity to exploit nature to its limits, and tendency toward universal alienation. Capitalism has always managed to extend the outer limits through 'spatial fixes,' expanding the geography of the system to cover nations and people formerly outside of its range. Whether it can continue to expand is an open question, but Harvey thinks it unlikely in the medium term future: the limits cannot extend much further, and the recent financial crisis is a harbinger of this.
Neoliberalism-the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action-has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.
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