Kunkel on David Harvey and Financial Crisis

From the London Review of Books:

How Much Is Too Much?

By Benjamin Kunkel

Excerpt: To date, a revived Keynesianism has formed a left boundary of economic debate in the press at large. Only specialised socialist journals have undertaken to diagnose capitalism’s latest distemper in explicitly or implicitly Marxian terms. As for books on the crisis, until recently the jostling crowd of titles included no Marxist study, the exception to this rule, John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff’s Great Financial Crisis, having been bolted together out of editorials from one of those socialist journals, the American Monthly Review. Not until now, with David Harvey’s Enigma of Capital, have we had a book-length example of Marxian crisis theory addressed to the current situation.

Few writers could be better qualified than Harvey to test the continuing validity of a Marxian approach to crisis, a situation he helpfully defines – dictionaries of economics tend to lack any entry for the word – as ‘surplus capital and surplus labour existing side by side with seemingly no way to put them back together’. (This is at once reminiscent of Keynes’s ‘underemployment equilibrium’ and of the news in the daily papers: in the US, corporations are sitting on almost two trillion dollars in cash while unemployment hovers just below 10 per cent.) Harvey, who was born in Kent, is the author of the monumental Limits to Capital – a thoroughgoing critique, synthesis and extension of the several varieties of crisis theory underwritten by Marx’s thought – and has been teaching courses on Marx, mainly in the US, for nearly four decades. His lectures on Volume I of Capital, available online, have become part of the self-education of many young leftists, and now supply the framework for his useful Companion to Marx’s ‘Capital’. (I sat in on his lectures at the City University of New York in the fall of 2007; a good Marxist, Harvey made no effort to find out whether any of us – too many for the available chairs – had registered and paid for the class.)

Since the publication of The Limits to Capital in the second year of the Reagan administration and at the dawn of what has come to be known as the financialisation of the world economy, the dual movement of Harvey’s career has been to return time and again to Marx as a teacher, and to extend his own ideas into new and more empirical territory. The most substantial of his recent books, Paris, Capital of Modernity (2003), described the city’s forcible modernisation by Baron Haussmann as a solution to structural crisis – ‘The problem in 1851 was to absorb the surpluses of capital and labour power’ – and situated this urban transformation within the renovation of Parisian humanity it induced. Harvey’s other post-millennial volumes, The New Imperialism (also 2003), A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) and now The Enigma of Capital, amount to a trilogy of self-popularisation and historical illustration, taking current events as a proving ground for what Harvey has called, referring to The Limits to Capital, ‘a reasonably good approximation to a general theory of capital accumulation in space and time’.

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