Crisis Now

Below David Harvey (b.1935) talks about crisis, capitalism, opportunity and Marx's theory of change. Harvey was presenting at the Marxism 2009 Conference, London, July 5, 2009.

David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), a leading social theorist of international standing, and earned a PhD in Geography from University of Cambridge in 1961.

His work has contributed greatly to broad social and political debate, most recently he has been credited with helping to bring back social class and Marxist methods as serious methodological tools in the critique of global capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal form.

In times of crisis we tend to look for opportunities to modify our reality. Intellectuals inevitably revisit past theories of social change.

Marx's proto-evolutionary dialectic theory attempted to map out the possibilities of the social and natural forces in the 19th century. Marx's opus Das Kapital was a sophisticated and incomplete analysis of humans relations within capital-based conditions. In it, Marx details his thoughts on "the economic formation of society as a process of natural history".