Reviews for The limits to capital

The average rating for The limits to capital based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-02-12 00:00:00 Paul Edelbergs I sometimes disagree with the common opinion on books. Usually I'm right there with everyone else, waving a flag. Make no mistake, I'm a follower. But this? This baffles me. So many lefties think that this is the greatest book of all time that I was positive I'd get something out of it. I was pretty sure I understood Marx before I started this. And I'm pretty sure I understand Marx now. And I'm pretty sure that Harvey added absolutely nothing to my understanding of Marx. (And just to be clear: I was super excited to read this when I started. Maybe my expectations were too high. And although I've written a very critical review, be advised that Harvey's book is undoubtedly superior to almost everything that was written on Marx in English in the twentieth century. It marks the end of one phase in the interpretation of Marx, and as such should still be in print and is worth reading.) The absurdities begin in the new introduction. The old introduction is quite sane. There he says that although he "could puff out this introduction with learned-sounding comments on matters such as epistemology and ontology, on the theory and practice of historical material, on the 'true' nature of dialectics" he will instead "let the methods of both enquiry and presentation speak for themselves." In the new introduction he says things like this: "I increasingly see Marx as a magisterial exponent of a process-based philosophy rather than a mere practitioner... of Hegel's 'Logic'." "Materialism of any sort demands that the triumvirate of space-time-process be considered as a unity at the ontological level." "There is, it turns out, an underlying spatio-temporal frame to Marx's theorizing and it rests on a dialectical fusion of three fundamental ways of understanding spatio-temporality," before claiming, incredibly, that for Kant space is "a fixed and unchanging grid." So the new introduction is more or less meaningless drivel. You can't understand Marx without understanding Hegel; you can't understand Hegel with understanding Kant, and Harvey shows pretty clearly here that he doesn't; and you certainly can't understand Marx by appealing to some absurd early twentieth century metaphysics of process (I assume he gets this BS from Whitehead.) As for the actual stuff of Marx: Harvey thinks the chapter on money, which is clearly a faux-'logical' analysis designed to show that money isn't worth any attention at all, is historical. If that's true, Marx is a moron. This is more important than it seems, since 'Capital' the book is based on this chapter. Everything follows from its attempt to show that money is a social-relation which is better analyzed by what Marx calls 'value.' Not exchange value, which is something else, and not use value; value is rather the measure between exchange values. This 'third thing' is based in post-Kantian philosophy. Marx's basic undertaking at this point is to say, "how is it that we even *conceive* of two things as being exchangeable?" It isn't money, it's Value. Because he fails to understand this, he also fails to understand Marx's most important category, abstract labour. Harvey sees it as a real, concrete thing: the less skilled you are as a worker, the closer you come to a mere abstract labourer. But the point of abstract labour is that it is how we apply the concept of Value to objects. Deskilling of workers, no matter how terrible it is, does not turn them into abstract labourers; we're all abstract labourers. There are too many other flaws in this book to mention particular cases. Harvey was involved in a raft of debates from the sixties and seventies which have no bearing on Marx, or our understanding of Marx, except inasmuch as they were pointless debates. To his credit, he acknowledges and shows convincingly that they were pointless. But it makes for horrible reading. Essentially, Harvey treats abstract and conceptual arguments as if they were 'materialist'; he hews to a bizarre conspiracy theory of capitalism; he everywhere calls an opposition a contradiction. The best I can say is that he translates concepts and events that are best described in neo-liberal economic terms into an out of date Marxist jargon (granted, it wasn't out of date when this was first published.) If you don't know by now that capitalism goes through periodic crises... yeesh. What's strange is that the other books of his I've read have been beautifully written, well argued and fascinating. This reads like nineteenth century German philosophy. If you're willing to bang your head against the wall of painful prose in order to understand Marx, drop this and pick up Moishe Postone's 'Time, Labor and Social Domination.' If it's possible, it might be even less sexy than Harvey's book. But at least it's involved in real debates. And if you want sexy, try some Lukacs or Althusser instead. Between the three of them, you'll get three interesting readings of Marx which avoid many of the pointless debates to which Harvey is, to his credit, bringing an end.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-03-16 00:00:00 Les Dotson David Harvey's book is the best synthesis of Marx's contributions to political economy I've read, one that goes beyond "Capital" itself to incorporate insights from Marx's other works (such as the "Grundrisse" and "Theories of Surplus Value"). I turned to this work just after reading vol. 1 & 2 of "Capital" with the aid of Harvey's video lecture series; I'm so glad because I think it helped further consolidate my understanding of Marx's thought. While this is a tougher read than his "The Enigma of Capital" (Harvey's analysis of the economic crisis of 2007-2008), I think this book is definitely the best kind of "introductory overview" you could give to an intellectual person of Marxian thought, provided you have just a little background in reading philosophy, political theory and/or critical social theory. But Harvey goes beyond that to provide a critique of some of the weaker aspects of Marx's thought (such as the crisis theory based upon the law of the falling rate of profit) and he even fleshes out some areas where Marx made some interesting beginning insights but left us without a completely coherent theory. In this vein, Harvey's development of the concept of finance capital is an important exploration of significance of "fictitious capital" and makes an important contribution to understanding current state of the global economy; considering this book was originally written in the early 80s, this section is astounding in its prescience in the light of recent history and the trauma brought to working people by the casino economy of finance capitalism. But given Harvey's area of expertise as a geographer, it is not surprising that his most intriguing insights are into the effects of time and space in the flow of capital and uneven geographic development; in the process, he actually strengthens and extends Marxist thinking about the problems of colonialism and imperialism. In short, Harvey's work actually makes valuable contributions to Marxist and radical thought, making it must-reading for all leftists and progressive activists of any stripe.