For over a half century, David Harvey has been a central figure in Marxist debates around the future of capitalism. He is not a firebrand with a septum piercing, nor is he a holdover European radical in the mold of the political parties Podemos or La France Insoumise, for whom the spirit of 1968 never died. Rather, Harvey is an academic geographer who has been reading Karl Marx’s 1,200-page tome Capital (Das Kapital) with his students since the early 1970s, first at Johns Hopkins and then the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. For decades, this close reading was an exercise in scholarly perseverance for those striving to get a grip on the fine details of left political economy. But during the 2007–2008 economic crisis, that all changed: Harvey went from a noted academic to something akin to a Marxist prophet.
As the world watched the global economy melt down—through hubris and a startling erosion of the New Deal–era regulations that tamed capitalism after the Great Depression—many millennial-age Americans were drawn to Harvey’s lectures on YouTube, including an animated video, viewed millions of times, that explains the breakdown of the subprime housing market. After years of challenging students to read Marx and to value strenuous engagement with primary texts, Harvey became an unlikely icon for activists, protesters, and, eventually, the Occupy movement in the United States and Europe. Crucially, he showed how housing became a new asset traded on Wall Street—first, through bundled mortgages and, after 2008, via the buying frenzy of firms like Blackstone that purchased distressed homes to become one of America’s biggest landlords in just 10 years. Most importantly, Harvey encouraged younger people not just to flirt with Marxism but to read the man himself.
Now, at 90 years old, he has written a book on Marx’s magnum opus for the generations who came after the New Left rupture of 1968. The Story of Capital connects two worlds: the world of the ivory tower and the world of the street protest. It also connects two eras of left-wing thinking, making links between Harvey’s own generation, who rejected dogmatically Soviet Marxism (the New Left), and the later generations of younger anti-capitalists who are often more attracted to decolonization, feminism, or critical race studies. The first bridge helps connect academics, who struggle over the meaning of labor theory of value (the idea that profits are made possible by workers’ sweat but not given to them), and activists who know they dislike capitalism but are fuzzy on the details. The second contribution lets in new thinking on society that Marx failed to consider carefully, or that developed after Volume 3 of Capital came out (in 1894, after his death): most importantly, the unpaid work women did to reproduce society as well as the role of race, colonization, and slavery in early capitalist economies.
Tracing technological innovation and the quickening pace of financial markets, The Story of Capital elegantly shows the need for Marx in the twenty-first century, as artificial intelligence portends mass unemployment and as global markets stray from real assets toward “fictitious capital,” such as holdings of meme stocks and cryptocurrencies. Harvey, channeling Marx, shows how financiers in 2026 are completely unable and unwilling to stave off future crises, and gestures toward what can be done.
The Story of Capital begins with Marx’s labor theory of value and his own witnessing of workers’ immiseration in the slums of Manchester, before moving on to urbanization, social reproduction, and environmentalism. The book is densely written, and is sure to please some of the more ardent academic Marxists who want to know why a falling rate of profit remains true in an era of super computers and automated factories. It also appeals to those fighting capitalism at the level of popular protest, by keeping in focus Marx’s emphasis on workers. What does increased productivity matter to the reserve army of labor facing declining wages or mass unemployment if the shipping containers leaving the port of Shanghai can be loaded with almost no humans involved? A theory of capitalism that can focus on the de-skilling and then replacement of human workers is much more illuminating than a celebratory account of humming assembly lines and worker-robots. As Harvey shows, Marx was banished from classrooms and forgotten by activists right when he was needed the most: the Reagan to Clinton years, when jobs were devalued and outsourced through the North American Free Trade Agreement while benefits were clawed back from those in poverty.
A theory of capitalism that can focus on the de-skilling and replacement of human workers is much more illuminating than a celebratory account of humming assembly lines.This is not to say that Marx thought that industrialization, mechanization, or globalization were bad things. He was no Luddite. His concern was the disconnect between profits and human need: Much like today’s industrial regions, the slums of nineteenth-century Manchester that Marx observed were filled with workers who were exhausted, unhealthy, and miserable while the factory owners dined on beef bourguignon and claret in their mansions. The factories these days just happen to be in Shenzhen or Dhaka, not the other side of town. Unlike the British machine wreckers of a generation before, Marx saw no way to stuff the technological genie back into the bottle. New tools must be utilized for the greatest good: Instead of getting rid of the factories, the public should take ownership of them.
Marx has always been chastised for his predictive gambits. He had a teleological view of history: Capitalism was exploitative and awful but also a necessary step—both organizationally and technologically—for people to come together and build socialism on the carcass of the former order. Part of his reasoning was historical: Capitalism was not an end state but a phase. The exploitation of workers under capitalism would become unbearable and lead to communism, he summarized. Annoyingly, for his followers, Russia established the first Communist government out of a feudalist agricultural society rather than the wage labor and factories of Germany or the U.K.
This complicates Marx’s vision. Yet faulty sequencing does not mean he was necessarily wrong. In this century and the last, Marx’s critics have painted him as a Eurocentric philosopher, who believed every nation would have to go through industrialization and capitalism as European countries had, in order to get to revolution and eventual communism. As Harvey observes, capitalism may have started in Europe, and that perhaps makes it a “Eurocentric” idea, but now it is practiced nearly everywhere in the world.
Harvey also uses Capital to think about social movements that arose after Marx’s death. Drawing on feminist scholars such as Tithi Bhattacharya and Melinda Cooper, Harvey shows how Capital inspired aspects of feminism—particularly feminist critiques of the regulation of the household, in which the nuclear family unit is designed to be as amenable to capitalist value creation as possible. In the midcentury, this meant women carrying almost all of the unpaid care work in a family, from cleaning to childrearing, while men devoted themselves to paid employment. The profit motive was also at work in the transformation of the family during neoliberal capitalism, when many more women began to take paid jobs and care work increasingly became monetized. Starting in the 1980s, the workforce changed in gender composition, particularly the rising service sector, but this actually boosted profits for large companies in comparison to the free labor of the midcentury unpaid housewife. While Marx could not have predicted a neoliberal order that both embraced and simultaneously attempted to suffocate 1970s feminism, he did show its power to eschew values of any kind as long as the bottom line was intact.
Another great asset of engaging with Marx, through Harvey’s guided tour, is that it allows us to think outside of the value-neutral rational choice theory of economics of our own times, which imagines people as big fleshy calculators assessing cost-benefit maximization in every instance, as if people act in their own self-interest and those actions somehow even out to form a balanced and just universe. Rather, capitalism has a constant problem of overusing resources. As Harvey puts it: “Individual capitalists operating in their own self-interest and seeking to maximize their profit undermine the sustainability of capital accumulation in general through their suboptimal but economically rational decision-making.” That is to say that one person’s great good luck of making a windfall from cutting down an Indonesian teak forest is most likely detrimental to quite a few other people, not to mention plants and animals. Harvey continues by observing:
The effect is to create an investment commons which maximizes individual returns while socializing and minimizing risks. But, as 2007-8 showed, the piling up of investments in high-risk housing finance eventually results in crises as the number of defaults and evictions skyrockets.
When the promise of risk mitigation is based on the “natural order” of individuals pursuing their unfettered interest and ignoring the so-called negative externalities, you quickly get a world in which profits are not shared but risk is collectivized.
By the end of the book, Harvey is keen to show that capitalism does not lift all boats through its global march to extract profit. Rather, capitalists accumulate wealth through dispossessing others. Corporations boost profits by keeping pay for their workers low; meanwhile Americans manage to live with stagnant pay because they can access rock-bottom-priced goods produced by workers paid even less overseas. More disturbingly, he points to forms of profit maximization that Marx could not have foreseen, such as the contemporary practice of harnessing crises to promote growth: buying up foreclosed homes, privatizing water as droughts intensify, or taking extreme risks on dodgy financial products with the knowledge that if a company goes belly-up, the state will step in and socialize its losses through emergency lending.
Most of all, Harvey communicates the hopefulness of Marx. He still wants to spread one of Marx’s most important messages: “Collectively, we can indeed change this world.”Like Marx himself, Harvey has always been more of a teacher than a futurologist. Getting people to engage with ideas and truly do the work of critical reading is the first transformative step to building political power and a new society. The process of deep reading and analysis is a luxury that more people would enjoy under socialism. If work was less mentally and physically draining, people could develop themselves more fully than being just a wage laborer or a petty-bourgeois professional. Indeed, Marx famously promised that in the post-capitalist world “it is possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner,” without having to take on any one thing as an identity or caste-like label.
Harvey’s concrete plans for a world after capitalism are equally flexible. Instead of insisting on revolution, he flirts with the more modest alternative of degrowth:
The only possible, if implausible, way to save capital from the finance capitalists would be the evolution of a systemically deflationary, low-growth economy in which Keynes’s “euthanasia of the rentiers” is coupled with Marx’s dream of the “expropriation of the expropriators” (that is, the billionaire class). Hints of what such an economy might look like can be found in the deflationary low-growth history of the Japanese economy after the speculative crash of 1990.
This idea is anathema to many economists and, in a world of fierce national competition, slowing down gross national product means that certain nations lose while others win. Yet it is one of the only theories of unwinding capitalism that considers the environmental limits to overconsumption.
Harvey has always eschewed Marx as a political-economic seer, and he puts forth the view that we should appreciate his prescience, writing from 175 years ago, rather than his (limited) bad hunches. Most of all, Harvey communicates the hopefulness of Marx. Refreshingly, despite the state of the world and of the United States, David Harvey still wants to spread one of Marx’s most important messages: “Collectively, we can indeed change this world, even though, as Marx points out, this is never done under conditions of our own choosing.”
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