Week 4: Marx

[Caitlin Ryan]

Discussion questions for David Harvey's The Enigma of Capital:

1. Although capitalism continues to run into crisis after crisis, as Marx predicted, why doesn’t it collapse? What arguments and evidence does Harvey use to answer this
2. What does it mean that capitalism “annihilates” space and time?
3. What does uneven development have to do with the reproduction of capitalism?
4. What is the right balance of the state’s involvement in financial markets, according to Harvey?
5. Enigma reflects many of the main arguments that Harvey made in 1982 in his magnum opus, Limits to Capital, but accessible to a non-academic audience and applied to the most recent crisis. Yet since we know that capitalism continuously comes up against crises, is Enigma’s approach too limited? Is its timescale too narrow? Marx said that the crises of capitalism would eventually turn the system over into something new. Is it possible that we just haven’t reached that point yet?
6. How is the type of capitalism that Harvey is talking about different from the kind that Marx was writing about in the 19^th century?
7. Cheap credit was the new “thesis” or resolution to the dual problems (thesis and antithesis) of needing to keep wages low and the need for capitalism to continue to grow. But credit is not so cheap anymore. So has the problem been solved? If not, what will be the next iteration of thesis-antithesis-synthesis in the capitalist system?
8. Harvey was much criticized for ignoring the gender and environmental dimensions of capitalism in Limits, and to some degree it seems that he has tried to answer those critics here. What, if anything, does he have to say on these topics, and is it sufficient?
9. Harvey lists 7 moving parts of the capitalist system and says that none of them are primary over all the others; rather that they co-evolve with one another. But Marx, as we read last week, believes that everything starts with the relations of production. Is Harvey’s argument here veering away from Marx? Is it problematic, or has Harvey reached the limits of what Marx could have to say about our current economic system?
10. What kind of system does Harvey advocate for in the last chapter? Is it possible to do this on a small scale, e.g. in some small towns, or must it be done on a grand scale only?
11. Harvey says that capitalism must have approximately 3% compound growth per year to be sustained, but he also acknowledges that he doesn’t think this type of growth can be maintained because every part of the world is now touched by, or deeply involved in, the capitalist system. So is this capitalism’s final limit, as Harvey would have us believe? Or is it just another barrier that will be overcome through a new synthesis of some kind? As one reviewer noted, it is not theoretically possible that capitalism will forever continue to find new frontiers?

Key terms/concepts:

• Crisis of over accumulation
• spatio-temporal fix
• financial hegemony
• 7 moving parts of the capitalist system
• the 3% compound growth rule

 

Questions for further research (or for Elizabeth!):

• We know of some of the main forms of capitalism over the last several hundred years (mercantilism, flexible production, etc.). Can we put together a chronology of the forms that capitalism has taken since the industrial and colonial periods? What characterizes them, what differentiates them from one another?

Finally, I'm attaching a review of Enigma that I found helpful for context and in coming up with a lot of these questions.