David Harvey, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason. Profile Books, 2017. Hbk £14.99.
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RATING: 82
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Buy this book?
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Yes
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This is an adventurous book. David Harvey has immense stature as a Marxist theorist and as an innovator in the application of Marxist theory in the specific fields of geography and urban development. Along with classic works of interpretation (Harvey, 1982) and hugely popular online teaching resources, he has regularly produced accessible critiques of contemporary global capitalism, and is unrivalled in terms of public engagement. Here he stretches Marx to the limit and beyond, in an endeavour to bring a perspective on the totality of capital in motion to bear on issues in contemporary left politics, not all anticipated by Marx himself. You cannot help but warm to someone who despises bankers, is so immune to conspicuous consumption that he still uses the cutlery bequeathed to him by his grandparents, and is exemplary in his long lifetime of honest toil. So get a copy, and if you happen not to be familiar with his earlier work, explore some of the nineteen other books listed at the front.
The text is structured as a self-contained introduction. It opens with a succinct summary of Marx's approach to capital as value in motion, focused mainly on Capital (all three volumes) and related notebooks (primarily the Grundrisse). Given that Marx's project remained incomplete, Harvey seeks to extend it by developing further the material published by Engels after Marx's death as Volumes 2 and 3, and addressing topics on which Marx was virtually silent (the significance of state ownership, production and spending), or which merit renewed attention (debt and its redemption as a specific aspect of the valorisation of capital, and the politics of distribution between factions of capital).
All this, in a little over 200 pages, with ample reference to contemporary developments, makes it a lively read, and one that is especially timely in view of the prediction from Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England (at the Canada Growth Summit on 12 April 2018) that the 'fourth industrial revolution' ('platforms, machine learning and Twitter') will exacerbate the emerging pattern of low wages, insecure employment and striking inequalities, and recreate the situation analysed by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto (http://www.cpac.ca/en/programs/public-record/episodes/61319375). Despite some uncertainty over dates and names, by the way, Carney's speech is worth a listen as an expression of the concerns of his class over the potential for the loss of hegemony of capital over labour.
Harvey's opening summary (Chapter 1) depicts capital as value in motion in the cycle of (1) purchase of means of production and labour power, (2) production, (3) realisation (sale at a profit), and (4) reinvestment in production on an expanded scale. This cycle is introduced through a partial analogy with the water cycle (evaporation, condensation, precipitation, etc), although Harvey quickly qualifies it as significantly different in the key respect that the volume of capital expands through each cycle while that of water does not. I'm not sure that the analogy is helpful, but in any case Harvey goes on immediately to map the cycle of capital valorisation itself, and the rest of the chapter does a good job of setting out Marx's approach, bringing out the nature of production as a 'social relation of exploitation of labour power' (10) that entails 'not only the production of commodities but also the production and reproduction of the class relation between capital and labour in the form of surplus value' (11). Of particular note are Harvey's 'signature' concern with the issue of effective demand as a central aspect of the 'realisation problem' (there being no guarantee that capitalists will be able to sell what they produce at a profit if there is insufficient demand either for the product itself or in the economy as a whole), his inclusion of the issue of social reproduction (as to which 'capital relies upon workers and their families to take care of their own processes of reproduction', 14), and his identification of areas where he finds Marx wanting or incomplete. First, Marx has little to say about the way in which merchants, landlords and bankers organise themselves politically and economically 'to shamelessly expropriate as much surplus value as they can from the industrial capitalists way beyond what would be justified by the performance of their indispensable function' (18); and at worst he relies on the assumption that returns to different forms of capital will tend to equalise over time (20); and as a result, he is oblivious to the potential for the creation of indebtedness to become a relatively independent stream of the cycle of valorisation of capital. Second, he neglects the possibility that a driving force of capital in motion 'might attach to the processes of realisation', disregarding the possibility that such a force could 'derive from public shifts in wants, needs and desires for different use values' - over the environment, for example (21). Third, 'the state can become a driving force in accumulation to the degree that it exercises powerful influences over effective demand for military equipment, police and surveillance technologies and a variety of instruments of social control, to say nothing of all the demands of routine administration and governance', and in fostering innovations and technological changes (22). And fourth, 'it is difficult to ignore the social and political struggles that occur within the general field of distribution': 'But to take these on board requires that we go much further than Marx who confined his analysis to the question of why these distributional forms could and should exist within a pure form of capitalism. A more dynamic perspective sees the rentiers, the merchants and the finance capitalists as distinctive power blocks acting in their own interest, seeking to appropriate as much capital as they can get away with' (22-3). Through the creation of indebtedness in the circulation of interest-bearing capital, 'the field of distribution internalises a tremendous incentive to perpetuate circulation through valorisation': 'It is not impossible to say that the incentive to redeem debts plays just as important a role in impelling future value production as the search for profit', while failure to redeem them conversely 'initiates the mother of all crises to the system of capital flow' (23). Later he returns emphatically to the same theme, suggesting that because Marx was concentrated in Volume 1 of Capital on the valorisation process, he 'did not probe very deeply into the new technologies and organisational forms evolving around realisation and consumption, around social reproduction (including the reproduction of labour power)':
The impression we are left with from reading Marx is of capital circulating with the technological mix constantly changing, often in very disruptive ways, at the point of production while the rest of the circulation process through realisation, distribution and reinvestment remains untouched. The truth, of course, is that the technologies of circulation have also been dramatically changing. The question this poses is to what degree do Marx's insights and prescient commentaries stand up to contemporary scrutiny given his obvious blind spots' (124-5, emphasis mine).
Harvey's method is to shuttle back and forth between Marx's classic texts and the contemporary world, after an overview of all three volumes of Capital in Chapter 2 depicting the first as principally focused on production and valorisation, the second on realisation, and the third on the distribution of surplus value between different forms of capital. Successive chapters explore particular themes deriving from this initial overview, and in doing so, advance a number of theses that give full play to the effort to apply Marx creatively to the present day. The tone is set at the end of the overview chapter, which Harvey rounds off with a 'note on political relevancy' (47-50). This highlights struggles around 'realisation' (between buyers and sellers over e.g. foreclosure and gentrification) and 'issues of social hierarchy, gender, sexuality, kinship and family and the like' that relate to 'the qualities of daily life rather than the labour process', struggles, he says, 'that have often been ignored in the Marxist literature'. And struggles over distribution 'call for an analysis of the often antagonistic relations between different factions of capital and the state apparatus' (48). So a study of value in motion confirms the need to go beyond capital-labour struggles to address these issues, along with other broader questions about the 'nature' of human nature, the construction, and reconstruction of wants, needs and desires, and the resulting politics of engaging, shaping and capturing the hearts and minds of the people for any kind of political-economic project. Chapter 3, on money as the representation of value, then highlights the breaking of the link between gold and the dollar in 1971 as a key turning point ('The abandonment of the metallic base to the monetary system in the early 1970s allowed the circulation of interest-bearing capital to take over as the principle (sic) and unrestrained driver of endless capital accumulation', 66), and again advocates a partial shift away from the relationship between capital and labour:
'The economics of expropriation and accumulation by dispossession enters into the picture in disruptive ways, orchestrated through the debt and credit system, only to be heightened as the difficulties of conventional paths to capital accumulation mount, as they have since the 1970s. Marx clearly sensed that of all the future dangers that the reproduction of capital faced, this was the one that might ultimately prove fatal, the irony being that the central contradiction in this case is not that between capital and labour; it lies in the antagonistic relation between different factions of capital' (70-71).
And so on, in successive chapters. However, Harvey is not simply seeking to develop incomplete aspects of Marx's overall project. At the same time he takes a series of positions that look increasingly like moves away from Marx, though it is not quite clear that Harvey intends them as such. Early on, and to judge from the context with reference to Volume 1, he has this to say: 'My guess is that Marx's primary intent in Capital is to deconstruct the utopian vision of free market capitalism that the political economists of the time were promoting. He wishes to show how market freedoms do not produce a result that is beneficial for all, as Smith supposes, but that it [sic] would produce a dystopia of misery for the masses and immense wealth for the propertied capitalist class' (25). If Harvey has chosen his words carefully ('primary intent'), as I assume he has, this is an extraordinary statement, heavily inflected towards present concerns and turning Marx into a version of Piketty (to whom no slight at all is intended), and quite at odds with the way in which Marx himself saw the contribution he was making.
When he turns to the challenge of realisation of value through sale, however, the shift away from the capital-labour relation in production takes a different turn. Building on Marx’s identification of the moment prior to the sale of the finished commodity, when the realisation of the value stored in it is at risk, as one of ‘not-value’, or ‘negated capital’, Harvey coins the term 'anti-value', by analogy with 'anti-matter' ('Had this analogy been available to [Marx], he probably would have used it', 73). This is mildly annoying, but the point is clear: capital must complete its cycle for accumulation to take place smoothly, and the more expeditiously it does so, the better, but every successive step is fraught with danger: 'Capitalists are ... locked in a perpetual battle not only to produce values but to combat their potential negation'; and the 'foundational social relation involved in realisation is that between buyers and sellers' (75, emphasis mine). What Harvey offers us here, if only briefly, is a social relation of realisation, or consumption. The idea is not developed further. But from this point on the idea of ‘anti-value’ expands beyond the precise context from which it is first taken, becoming a catch-all term for activity outside or opposed to the logic of capital, and for the nexus of credit and debt. So first '[t]he anti-value that arises from technical glitches and hold-ups in the circulation of capital morphs into the active anti-value of political resistance to commodification and privatisation', and 'defines an active field of anti-capitalist struggle' (76); and ‘[t]he working class (however defined) is the embodiment of anti-value' (76-7). Next, the conventional claim that ‘debt is a claim on future value production that can be redeemed only through value production. If future value production is insufficient to redeem the debt then there is a crisis’ is rephrased: ‘Collisions between value and anti-value spark periodic monetary and financial crises’ (80). Harvey seems unsure of the orthodoxy of this conceptual innovation: Marx’s reflection that the role of creditor or debtor resulting from the simple circulation of commodities is ‘only a reflection of an antagonism which lays deeper, at the level of the economic conditions of existence’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 233) prompts the remark, ‘Is Marx referring here to the hidden dialectic of the value-anti-value relation? I like to think so’ (82); a moment later, he is entirely convinced: ‘The importance of the pairing of value and anti-value in Marx’s thinking is either ignored or given short shrift in presentations on the subject’; but just as quickly a doubt surfaces: ‘Whether Marx himself understood all the implications of this is an interesting question’ (84).
And later, Harvey gestures towards a different strategy for bring the different strands of causality he identifies together, and adopts in doing so into a stance of explicit analytical pluralism. He identifies
'seven moments - technologies, the relation to nature, social relations, mode of material production, daily life, mental conceptions and institutional frameworks - [that] relate within the totality of capitalism in a process of continuous evolution powered by the continuous circulation of capital that functions, as it were, as the engine of the totality. Developments across all seven moments, each of which is autonomous and independent but overlapping and relationally bound to the others, can move the totality in one direction or another. By the same token, recalcitrance or immovability around any one moment can stymie processes occurring elsewhere' (113).
Again, he comes close to suggesting that this formulation captures Marx’s own method, suggesting that in Marx’s substantive work 'there is no prime mover, but a mess of often contradictory movements across and between the different moments that have to be uncovered and worked out' (114). If we take this as rejecting a view of Marx as a determinist, economic, technological or otherwise, or as alluding, for example, to the injunction in the German Ideology that empirical observation 'must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production', or in the Grundrisse that the precise configuration of forces and institutions at any location and point in time in the world market will be the result of a complex and many-stranded trajectory of struggle and change, resulting in unique configurations that are all ‘rich totalities of many determinations and relations’, we are on familiar ground. But it's not clear that this is what Harvey has in mind, as he goes on to say, in relation to hopes for socialist or communist revolution, that Marx 'was never able to specify what configuration of these seven moments might bring about such changes' (114).
This is challenging fare, then, and if you are already throwing up your hands in horror, let's remember that the world is not awash with convincing programmes of resistance based upon deep knowledge of Marx and a willingness to think creatively about the development of his project. It’s clear what Harvey is trying to do – to find ways of developing incomplete aspects of Marx’s critique of political economy that are consistent with but not reduced to his analysis of production and valorisation, and therefore able to contribute to a dynamic and non-deterministic but still unified view of the totality of capital in motion that can illuminate present concerns. Hence, for example, the parallel he draws between struggles in the 'hidden abode of production' and in the market place that are often seen as separate: 'both sorts of struggles are subsumed within the overall logic and dynamism of capital circulation viewed as a totality' (77).
What, then, are we to make of it all? Two things struck me forcibly as the analysis proceeded. First, the method of shuttling between Marx’s texts and the present day has the consequence of provoking a fundamental question: how much of what we observe in the present is new, and unaddressed by Marx? Or to put it in terms of a reference that shapes the final chapter, on the madness of economic reason, is money madder than ever, or just as mad as it always was? On the one hand, Harvey suggests that we are in new times, as with the severing of the link between paper money (the dollar) and gold, the creation of credit and debt was freed up to play a greater role, both in financing production, and inducing the propertyless to produce surplus value, so that the system as a whole is now driven by debt rather than by valorisation: ‘The rich grow richer through financial manipulations while the poor become poorer through the necessity to redeem their debts (both individual and collective as in state borrowings). Meanwhile, valorisation seems almost an afterthought, left to the poorest countries on planet earth to struggle with’ (83). Rational capitalists will place their money in property markets or other forms of asset speculation, and the result (and here he aligns himself with Larry Summers of all people) ‘could be a deepening tendency towards secular stagnation in the economy as a whole’ (94, cf. 100, 105). On the other hand, he draws parallels between booms in speculative urban investment in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, New York a century later, and Beijing in the last decade, suggesting fundamental continuity, and later (202) draws a precise parallel between the post-2007/8 financial crisis and the final phase in the industrial cycle described by Marx in Capital, Volume 3, citing at length a passage that is preceded by the following:
‘This industrial cycle is such that the same circuit must periodically reproduce itself, once the first impulse has been given. In the slack phase, production falls below the level it attained in the previous cycle and for which the technical basis is now laid. In the phase of prosperity – the middle period – it develops further on this basis. In the period of overproduction, and swindling, the productive forces are stretched to their limit, even beyond the capitalist barriers to the production process. The reason for the lack of means of payment in the crisis period is self-evident. The convertibility of bills of exchange has replaced the metamorphosis of the actual commodities, and all the more so at such a time in so far as one group of firms is operating purely on credit’ (Capital, 3, 620-21).
So, we might ask, are we really in new times, or does the present crisis perhaps ‘form the starting point for new investments’? And if so, does it lay ‘from the point of view of society as a whole a new material basis for the next turnover cycle’? (cf p. 152). In which case, should more attention be paid to production and valorisation (and the capital-labour relation) on a global scale after all? Harvey concentrates almost all his attention on issues adjacent to rather than directly concerned with the capital relation, but he comments towards the end on the changes over the last thirty years in the ‘geographical landscape for competitive production’, suggesting that ‘the differentials between regional value regimes are disappearing and that we are much closer now to a globally unified and singular value regime’ (161), as a consequence of the ‘wave of technological and organisational innovations that have occurred since the 1980s’ (163). As a result, ‘We are closer to a global labour market now than ever before in human history’ (169). And later: ‘The labour forces of the world have been brought into a competitive relation with each other by declining transport and communication costs, organisational technologies and changing speed (rather than costs) of movement as well as through the development of complex commodity chains’ (192).
Harvey is thoroughly familiar with the discussion in Chapter 15 of Capital, Volume 1, on the manner in which capital first takes over existing conditions and processes as it finds them, then ‘subdivides existing divisions of labour into ever finer-grained specialised divisions forming parts of a much larger whole’, moves to the production of machines by machines, turns workers into ‘fragments’ locked into a particular function, then finally demands that they become ‘totally developed individuals who are able to take up different modes of activity in turn’, and he runs through precisely this sequence in relation to Marx’s account of factory production (116-8). But he doesn’t bring it together with his extended discussion of the changing ‘space and time of value’, discussed at length in Chapter 7, or relate it to contemporary patterns of work. There is a direct line though, entirely explicable in terms of the changing character of the capital relation in conditions of global competition, technological advance, and the completion of the world market, to the contemporary fragmentation of jobs, and atomisation of labour and of the working class.
The conclusion I draw is that the central contradiction is more than ever between capital and labour after all, and the new technologies and organisational forms that matter are more than ever those that develop within the sphere of production and valorisation. And it is precisely these new technologies and organisational forms, born within the hidden sphere of production, that are increasingly shaping all aspects of our daily lives (Cammack, 2015). Far from meaning that issues such as changing patterns of social reproduction must be addressed separately or not at all, they are best examined entirely within the framework of revolutions in production and the precipitous advance of commodification, extending even to the production of human life itself.
References
Paul Cammack, ‘Production and social reproduction in the contemporary world market: the social production complex’, Paper presented at the 9th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, Giardini Naxos, Sicily, September 2015 (https://www.academia.edu/15926705/Production_and_social_reproduction_in_the_contemporary_world_market_the_social_production_complex).
David Harvey 1982, The Limits to Capital, Oxford (revised 1999).
The text is structured as a self-contained introduction. It opens with a succinct summary of Marx's approach to capital as value in motion, focused mainly on Capital (all three volumes) and related notebooks (primarily the Grundrisse). Given that Marx's project remained incomplete, Harvey seeks to extend it by developing further the material published by Engels after Marx's death as Volumes 2 and 3, and addressing topics on which Marx was virtually silent (the significance of state ownership, production and spending), or which merit renewed attention (debt and its redemption as a specific aspect of the valorisation of capital, and the politics of distribution between factions of capital).
All this, in a little over 200 pages, with ample reference to contemporary developments, makes it a lively read, and one that is especially timely in view of the prediction from Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of England (at the Canada Growth Summit on 12 April 2018) that the 'fourth industrial revolution' ('platforms, machine learning and Twitter') will exacerbate the emerging pattern of low wages, insecure employment and striking inequalities, and recreate the situation analysed by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto (http://www.cpac.ca/en/programs/public-record/episodes/61319375). Despite some uncertainty over dates and names, by the way, Carney's speech is worth a listen as an expression of the concerns of his class over the potential for the loss of hegemony of capital over labour.
Harvey's opening summary (Chapter 1) depicts capital as value in motion in the cycle of (1) purchase of means of production and labour power, (2) production, (3) realisation (sale at a profit), and (4) reinvestment in production on an expanded scale. This cycle is introduced through a partial analogy with the water cycle (evaporation, condensation, precipitation, etc), although Harvey quickly qualifies it as significantly different in the key respect that the volume of capital expands through each cycle while that of water does not. I'm not sure that the analogy is helpful, but in any case Harvey goes on immediately to map the cycle of capital valorisation itself, and the rest of the chapter does a good job of setting out Marx's approach, bringing out the nature of production as a 'social relation of exploitation of labour power' (10) that entails 'not only the production of commodities but also the production and reproduction of the class relation between capital and labour in the form of surplus value' (11). Of particular note are Harvey's 'signature' concern with the issue of effective demand as a central aspect of the 'realisation problem' (there being no guarantee that capitalists will be able to sell what they produce at a profit if there is insufficient demand either for the product itself or in the economy as a whole), his inclusion of the issue of social reproduction (as to which 'capital relies upon workers and their families to take care of their own processes of reproduction', 14), and his identification of areas where he finds Marx wanting or incomplete. First, Marx has little to say about the way in which merchants, landlords and bankers organise themselves politically and economically 'to shamelessly expropriate as much surplus value as they can from the industrial capitalists way beyond what would be justified by the performance of their indispensable function' (18); and at worst he relies on the assumption that returns to different forms of capital will tend to equalise over time (20); and as a result, he is oblivious to the potential for the creation of indebtedness to become a relatively independent stream of the cycle of valorisation of capital. Second, he neglects the possibility that a driving force of capital in motion 'might attach to the processes of realisation', disregarding the possibility that such a force could 'derive from public shifts in wants, needs and desires for different use values' - over the environment, for example (21). Third, 'the state can become a driving force in accumulation to the degree that it exercises powerful influences over effective demand for military equipment, police and surveillance technologies and a variety of instruments of social control, to say nothing of all the demands of routine administration and governance', and in fostering innovations and technological changes (22). And fourth, 'it is difficult to ignore the social and political struggles that occur within the general field of distribution': 'But to take these on board requires that we go much further than Marx who confined his analysis to the question of why these distributional forms could and should exist within a pure form of capitalism. A more dynamic perspective sees the rentiers, the merchants and the finance capitalists as distinctive power blocks acting in their own interest, seeking to appropriate as much capital as they can get away with' (22-3). Through the creation of indebtedness in the circulation of interest-bearing capital, 'the field of distribution internalises a tremendous incentive to perpetuate circulation through valorisation': 'It is not impossible to say that the incentive to redeem debts plays just as important a role in impelling future value production as the search for profit', while failure to redeem them conversely 'initiates the mother of all crises to the system of capital flow' (23). Later he returns emphatically to the same theme, suggesting that because Marx was concentrated in Volume 1 of Capital on the valorisation process, he 'did not probe very deeply into the new technologies and organisational forms evolving around realisation and consumption, around social reproduction (including the reproduction of labour power)':
The impression we are left with from reading Marx is of capital circulating with the technological mix constantly changing, often in very disruptive ways, at the point of production while the rest of the circulation process through realisation, distribution and reinvestment remains untouched. The truth, of course, is that the technologies of circulation have also been dramatically changing. The question this poses is to what degree do Marx's insights and prescient commentaries stand up to contemporary scrutiny given his obvious blind spots' (124-5, emphasis mine).
Harvey's method is to shuttle back and forth between Marx's classic texts and the contemporary world, after an overview of all three volumes of Capital in Chapter 2 depicting the first as principally focused on production and valorisation, the second on realisation, and the third on the distribution of surplus value between different forms of capital. Successive chapters explore particular themes deriving from this initial overview, and in doing so, advance a number of theses that give full play to the effort to apply Marx creatively to the present day. The tone is set at the end of the overview chapter, which Harvey rounds off with a 'note on political relevancy' (47-50). This highlights struggles around 'realisation' (between buyers and sellers over e.g. foreclosure and gentrification) and 'issues of social hierarchy, gender, sexuality, kinship and family and the like' that relate to 'the qualities of daily life rather than the labour process', struggles, he says, 'that have often been ignored in the Marxist literature'. And struggles over distribution 'call for an analysis of the often antagonistic relations between different factions of capital and the state apparatus' (48). So a study of value in motion confirms the need to go beyond capital-labour struggles to address these issues, along with other broader questions about the 'nature' of human nature, the construction, and reconstruction of wants, needs and desires, and the resulting politics of engaging, shaping and capturing the hearts and minds of the people for any kind of political-economic project. Chapter 3, on money as the representation of value, then highlights the breaking of the link between gold and the dollar in 1971 as a key turning point ('The abandonment of the metallic base to the monetary system in the early 1970s allowed the circulation of interest-bearing capital to take over as the principle (sic) and unrestrained driver of endless capital accumulation', 66), and again advocates a partial shift away from the relationship between capital and labour:
'The economics of expropriation and accumulation by dispossession enters into the picture in disruptive ways, orchestrated through the debt and credit system, only to be heightened as the difficulties of conventional paths to capital accumulation mount, as they have since the 1970s. Marx clearly sensed that of all the future dangers that the reproduction of capital faced, this was the one that might ultimately prove fatal, the irony being that the central contradiction in this case is not that between capital and labour; it lies in the antagonistic relation between different factions of capital' (70-71).
And so on, in successive chapters. However, Harvey is not simply seeking to develop incomplete aspects of Marx's overall project. At the same time he takes a series of positions that look increasingly like moves away from Marx, though it is not quite clear that Harvey intends them as such. Early on, and to judge from the context with reference to Volume 1, he has this to say: 'My guess is that Marx's primary intent in Capital is to deconstruct the utopian vision of free market capitalism that the political economists of the time were promoting. He wishes to show how market freedoms do not produce a result that is beneficial for all, as Smith supposes, but that it [sic] would produce a dystopia of misery for the masses and immense wealth for the propertied capitalist class' (25). If Harvey has chosen his words carefully ('primary intent'), as I assume he has, this is an extraordinary statement, heavily inflected towards present concerns and turning Marx into a version of Piketty (to whom no slight at all is intended), and quite at odds with the way in which Marx himself saw the contribution he was making.
When he turns to the challenge of realisation of value through sale, however, the shift away from the capital-labour relation in production takes a different turn. Building on Marx’s identification of the moment prior to the sale of the finished commodity, when the realisation of the value stored in it is at risk, as one of ‘not-value’, or ‘negated capital’, Harvey coins the term 'anti-value', by analogy with 'anti-matter' ('Had this analogy been available to [Marx], he probably would have used it', 73). This is mildly annoying, but the point is clear: capital must complete its cycle for accumulation to take place smoothly, and the more expeditiously it does so, the better, but every successive step is fraught with danger: 'Capitalists are ... locked in a perpetual battle not only to produce values but to combat their potential negation'; and the 'foundational social relation involved in realisation is that between buyers and sellers' (75, emphasis mine). What Harvey offers us here, if only briefly, is a social relation of realisation, or consumption. The idea is not developed further. But from this point on the idea of ‘anti-value’ expands beyond the precise context from which it is first taken, becoming a catch-all term for activity outside or opposed to the logic of capital, and for the nexus of credit and debt. So first '[t]he anti-value that arises from technical glitches and hold-ups in the circulation of capital morphs into the active anti-value of political resistance to commodification and privatisation', and 'defines an active field of anti-capitalist struggle' (76); and ‘[t]he working class (however defined) is the embodiment of anti-value' (76-7). Next, the conventional claim that ‘debt is a claim on future value production that can be redeemed only through value production. If future value production is insufficient to redeem the debt then there is a crisis’ is rephrased: ‘Collisions between value and anti-value spark periodic monetary and financial crises’ (80). Harvey seems unsure of the orthodoxy of this conceptual innovation: Marx’s reflection that the role of creditor or debtor resulting from the simple circulation of commodities is ‘only a reflection of an antagonism which lays deeper, at the level of the economic conditions of existence’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 233) prompts the remark, ‘Is Marx referring here to the hidden dialectic of the value-anti-value relation? I like to think so’ (82); a moment later, he is entirely convinced: ‘The importance of the pairing of value and anti-value in Marx’s thinking is either ignored or given short shrift in presentations on the subject’; but just as quickly a doubt surfaces: ‘Whether Marx himself understood all the implications of this is an interesting question’ (84).
And later, Harvey gestures towards a different strategy for bring the different strands of causality he identifies together, and adopts in doing so into a stance of explicit analytical pluralism. He identifies
'seven moments - technologies, the relation to nature, social relations, mode of material production, daily life, mental conceptions and institutional frameworks - [that] relate within the totality of capitalism in a process of continuous evolution powered by the continuous circulation of capital that functions, as it were, as the engine of the totality. Developments across all seven moments, each of which is autonomous and independent but overlapping and relationally bound to the others, can move the totality in one direction or another. By the same token, recalcitrance or immovability around any one moment can stymie processes occurring elsewhere' (113).
Again, he comes close to suggesting that this formulation captures Marx’s own method, suggesting that in Marx’s substantive work 'there is no prime mover, but a mess of often contradictory movements across and between the different moments that have to be uncovered and worked out' (114). If we take this as rejecting a view of Marx as a determinist, economic, technological or otherwise, or as alluding, for example, to the injunction in the German Ideology that empirical observation 'must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production', or in the Grundrisse that the precise configuration of forces and institutions at any location and point in time in the world market will be the result of a complex and many-stranded trajectory of struggle and change, resulting in unique configurations that are all ‘rich totalities of many determinations and relations’, we are on familiar ground. But it's not clear that this is what Harvey has in mind, as he goes on to say, in relation to hopes for socialist or communist revolution, that Marx 'was never able to specify what configuration of these seven moments might bring about such changes' (114).
This is challenging fare, then, and if you are already throwing up your hands in horror, let's remember that the world is not awash with convincing programmes of resistance based upon deep knowledge of Marx and a willingness to think creatively about the development of his project. It’s clear what Harvey is trying to do – to find ways of developing incomplete aspects of Marx’s critique of political economy that are consistent with but not reduced to his analysis of production and valorisation, and therefore able to contribute to a dynamic and non-deterministic but still unified view of the totality of capital in motion that can illuminate present concerns. Hence, for example, the parallel he draws between struggles in the 'hidden abode of production' and in the market place that are often seen as separate: 'both sorts of struggles are subsumed within the overall logic and dynamism of capital circulation viewed as a totality' (77).
What, then, are we to make of it all? Two things struck me forcibly as the analysis proceeded. First, the method of shuttling between Marx’s texts and the present day has the consequence of provoking a fundamental question: how much of what we observe in the present is new, and unaddressed by Marx? Or to put it in terms of a reference that shapes the final chapter, on the madness of economic reason, is money madder than ever, or just as mad as it always was? On the one hand, Harvey suggests that we are in new times, as with the severing of the link between paper money (the dollar) and gold, the creation of credit and debt was freed up to play a greater role, both in financing production, and inducing the propertyless to produce surplus value, so that the system as a whole is now driven by debt rather than by valorisation: ‘The rich grow richer through financial manipulations while the poor become poorer through the necessity to redeem their debts (both individual and collective as in state borrowings). Meanwhile, valorisation seems almost an afterthought, left to the poorest countries on planet earth to struggle with’ (83). Rational capitalists will place their money in property markets or other forms of asset speculation, and the result (and here he aligns himself with Larry Summers of all people) ‘could be a deepening tendency towards secular stagnation in the economy as a whole’ (94, cf. 100, 105). On the other hand, he draws parallels between booms in speculative urban investment in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, New York a century later, and Beijing in the last decade, suggesting fundamental continuity, and later (202) draws a precise parallel between the post-2007/8 financial crisis and the final phase in the industrial cycle described by Marx in Capital, Volume 3, citing at length a passage that is preceded by the following:
‘This industrial cycle is such that the same circuit must periodically reproduce itself, once the first impulse has been given. In the slack phase, production falls below the level it attained in the previous cycle and for which the technical basis is now laid. In the phase of prosperity – the middle period – it develops further on this basis. In the period of overproduction, and swindling, the productive forces are stretched to their limit, even beyond the capitalist barriers to the production process. The reason for the lack of means of payment in the crisis period is self-evident. The convertibility of bills of exchange has replaced the metamorphosis of the actual commodities, and all the more so at such a time in so far as one group of firms is operating purely on credit’ (Capital, 3, 620-21).
So, we might ask, are we really in new times, or does the present crisis perhaps ‘form the starting point for new investments’? And if so, does it lay ‘from the point of view of society as a whole a new material basis for the next turnover cycle’? (cf p. 152). In which case, should more attention be paid to production and valorisation (and the capital-labour relation) on a global scale after all? Harvey concentrates almost all his attention on issues adjacent to rather than directly concerned with the capital relation, but he comments towards the end on the changes over the last thirty years in the ‘geographical landscape for competitive production’, suggesting that ‘the differentials between regional value regimes are disappearing and that we are much closer now to a globally unified and singular value regime’ (161), as a consequence of the ‘wave of technological and organisational innovations that have occurred since the 1980s’ (163). As a result, ‘We are closer to a global labour market now than ever before in human history’ (169). And later: ‘The labour forces of the world have been brought into a competitive relation with each other by declining transport and communication costs, organisational technologies and changing speed (rather than costs) of movement as well as through the development of complex commodity chains’ (192).
Harvey is thoroughly familiar with the discussion in Chapter 15 of Capital, Volume 1, on the manner in which capital first takes over existing conditions and processes as it finds them, then ‘subdivides existing divisions of labour into ever finer-grained specialised divisions forming parts of a much larger whole’, moves to the production of machines by machines, turns workers into ‘fragments’ locked into a particular function, then finally demands that they become ‘totally developed individuals who are able to take up different modes of activity in turn’, and he runs through precisely this sequence in relation to Marx’s account of factory production (116-8). But he doesn’t bring it together with his extended discussion of the changing ‘space and time of value’, discussed at length in Chapter 7, or relate it to contemporary patterns of work. There is a direct line though, entirely explicable in terms of the changing character of the capital relation in conditions of global competition, technological advance, and the completion of the world market, to the contemporary fragmentation of jobs, and atomisation of labour and of the working class.
The conclusion I draw is that the central contradiction is more than ever between capital and labour after all, and the new technologies and organisational forms that matter are more than ever those that develop within the sphere of production and valorisation. And it is precisely these new technologies and organisational forms, born within the hidden sphere of production, that are increasingly shaping all aspects of our daily lives (Cammack, 2015). Far from meaning that issues such as changing patterns of social reproduction must be addressed separately or not at all, they are best examined entirely within the framework of revolutions in production and the precipitous advance of commodification, extending even to the production of human life itself.
References
Paul Cammack, ‘Production and social reproduction in the contemporary world market: the social production complex’, Paper presented at the 9th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, Giardini Naxos, Sicily, September 2015 (https://www.academia.edu/15926705/Production_and_social_reproduction_in_the_contemporary_world_market_the_social_production_complex).
David Harvey 1982, The Limits to Capital, Oxford (revised 1999).