Me on David Harvey and his lectures on Capital Volume 1:

What is known as "actually existing socialism" collapsed at the close of the 1980s, and at the opening of the 1990s, a confident neocon scholar (parroted by politicians) brought life back to right-wing Hegelianism by declaring that history had indeed come to an end. By this he meant that geist, the motor of history—history being the expansion of freedom over time—had fully been realized by the liberal democracies of advanced capitalist societies. This end of history, which removed all limits from neoliberal policies—neoliberalism having been birthed in the mid-1970s in New York City (using an economic crisis to discipline a city government) and in Chile (privatization of the economy under the influence of the Chicago Boys)—lasted for almost two decades. But humanity lived long enough to see that the end of the world also has an end. That end was the bank bailout of 2008, and the book that offers the best starting point toward an explanation of the current crisis is Capital by Marx.

The book is not easy. Much in it cannot be made sense of without the guidance of a mind that's very familiar with its mode of presentation. And one of the best people to do this for you is the geographer David Harvey—the leading Marxist of our time. Originally from England and currently a professor at the City University of New York, Harvey has taught the book for four decades. He knows its ins and outs like nobody's business. The French structuralist Louis Althusser is famous for describing Capital as a book about Marx reading other books from the classical period of political economy—Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo. Harvey's course on Capital is essentially a very close reading of the reader of the main books of the classical period of political economy. Through him you digest everything.

In June 2008, Harvey posted his entire university course on Capital on his website. For nothing, anyone can download it as a video or MP3 file. There are a total of 13 lectures, each running about an hour and a half. The timing of this lecture series could not have been better. Around the corner from it was the bailout, the end of neoliberalism as it had been known for 20 years, and the beginning of the great recession, which has yet to end. The response to the lectures was very strong—according to Google Analytics, Harvey's site has had 700,000 page views from 10,884 cities in 187 countries. The success of the series led to the publishing, just this past March, of the book A Companion to Marx's Capital.

In January 2012, David Harvey began his lectures on Marx’s Capital Volume 2, a book that's not as entertaining or engaging as Volume 1 (both 2 and 3 lack the real stars of Volume 1, the footnotes). Harvey, however, holds a very high opinion of Volume 2 and promises to expose the greatness that's buried beneath its dryness.

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