Reading Marx's Capital with David Harvey

The Story of Capital connects the world of the academy and the world of the street protest.

By Max Holleran
The New Republic
July 27, 2026

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.

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Andy Merrifield’s Roses for Gramsci, a highly personal history of the Italian thinker and his work, examines his influence across generations.

Book Review by Aditya Bahl
The Nation
June 3, 2026

Fifty years after Selections From the Prison Notebooks was first published in 1971, the joke remains popular: Antonio Gramsci is a communist you can bring home to your parents. It wouldn’t matter if they were liberals or Maoists, social democrats or anti-imperialists, populists or pacifists—everyone gets along with Antonio.

The reasons for Gramsci’s popularity, as well as his pliability, lie in the unique form of his oeuvre. His themes, for one, are startlingly capacious: serial novels and popular theater, factory councils and peasant estates, Catholicism and communism, newspaper design and comparative grammar, folklore and opera. There’s something here for everyone. At the same time, Gramsci’s prison writing—over 3,000 pages across 33 notebooks—is peppered with myriad “Aesopian” codes and terms. These ciphers were originally intended to confound Benito Mussolini’s Fascist censors, but their diffuse meanings have since triggered a series of heated polemics. And so, apart from attracting an unusually diverse readership, Gramsci’s work has also spawned diverse, frequently disparate, interpretations.

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For many of us, David Harvey was our introduction to Marxism. Whether it was the seminal course on Capital that went viral after the recession, his famous books on postmodernism or neoliberalism, or the giant tomes introducing Marx’s major works—everyone had an entry point. In my case it was 2015 at the Birkbeck critical theory summer school. I attended Harvey’s lectures as a 20-something graduate student. Not only did they blow me away, but I was struck by his kindness, respect and availability. After the talks, Harvey would inevitably head upstairs to grab a few beers (more than a few for the younger crowd). He’d happily discuss, debate or explain the material as you wished it. Harvey was the true model of a left wing intellectual. Smart, vastly erudite and creative but always democratic, considerate and open to dialogue. And so he’s remained.

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The Story of Capital makes a major contribution to Marxist theory and critical communication studies. Harvey offers a synthetic, lucid, and expansive account of capital’s totality. The book’s strengths are evident from its conceptual architecture. Harvey integrates production, circulation, realisation, technology, finance, fixed capital, social reproduction, extractivism, the rentier, and the state-finance nexus within one moving field. Apple, Google, Amazon, Musk, Silicon Valley, AI, Blackstone, central banks, higher education, and military research all appear inside the same theoretical horizon. That concreteness greatly enhances the book’s usefulness for communication scholars.

The book’s second major strength lies in its treatment of the state. Harvey integrates the economy and the state within a single moving field. Harvey shows how state functions inhabit the inner structure of accumulation and how financial governance, public debt, infrastructural investment, military competition, and territorial control enter capital’s very operation. This framework is especially valuable for media and digital analysis because communication infrastructures often sit at the intersection of state policy, military investment, research funding, and corporate platform expansion.

The third major strength lies in Harvey’s historical sensibility. Harvey consistently treats capital as geographically uneven, historically specific, and internally contradictory. This sensibility allows the book to move from Manchester to Shenzhen, from Venice to Silicon Valley, from the factory to the airport, from the university to the central bank. The communication analysis gains force because it appears inside this broader historical map.

Read the full review by John Bessai in Communication, Capitalism & Critique.