Marx is dead, and I don't feel too good myself

SEVENTEEN CONTRADICTIONS AND THE END OF CAPITALISM
David Harvey
Hachette India; 337
pages; Rs 699

"It is not entirely beyond the realms of possibility that capital could survive," David Harvey concedes towards the end of Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, "For example, by a capitalistic oligarchic elite supervising the mass genocidal elimination of much of the world's surplus and disposable population while enslaving the rest and building vast artificial gated environments to protect against the ravages of an external nature run toxic, barren and ruinously wild."

This most recent book in Professor Harvey's prolific career as an anthropologist and a Marxist scholar is an attempt to read the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash through the prism of Marx's Capital, Volume I and II. Clear and concise, Seventeen Contradictions is a useful resource for those seeking steady and reasonable Marxist analyses of our troubled times.

Those in search of a revolutionary handbook, however, are likely to be disappointed. The early Harvey offered an exciting and radical new way of looking at the world with his work on historical geographical materialism - or Marxist geography - whereas his most recent avatar offers a sort of philosophy via newspaper.

The absence of a deep engagement with a physical site - and the granular knowledge such encounters engender - leads to fairly generic accounts of oligarchs in America, call centres in India, state capitalism in China and dispossession in Africa.

Professor Harvey's account is one of the relentless march of capitalism where resistance is comprised of "all those who have reassembled postmodern fragmentations under the banner of a largely incomprehensible post-structuralism that favours identity politics and eschews class analysis".

For Professor Harvey, the world is going to hell in a handbasket while the kids sit around reading Foucault.

Having said that, it is illuminating to examine the world through a Marxist lens - particularly now, when the crisis of finance has been followed by a crisis of thought among both the mainstream Left and the Right. At each step, Professor Harvey connects an established Marxist formulation with recent events.

In the chapter on "the contradictory unity of production and realisation", for instance, he explains the concept of the "industrial reserve army" that Marx posits as necessary for capital's project of lowering workers' wages and increasing profits at the site of production. But low wages become a problem at the marketplace, where a large unemployed reserve army makes for a poor customer base.

This account is reminiscent of a powerful chapter in The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, by The New Yorker's staff writer George Packer. In "Mr Sam", a chapter on Sam Walton - the founder of Wal-Mart - Mr Packer describes how the world's largest discount store pays its workers so little that they have no option but to shop at the world's largest discount store: "The small towns where Mr Sam had seen his opportunity were getting poorer, which meant that consumers there depended more and more on everyday low prices, and made every last purchase at Wal-Mart, and maybe had to work there too."

The book also offers a useful critique of the old Left when Professor Harvey notes, "the tendency in left thinking is to privilege the labour market and the workplace as the twin central domains of class struggle". A preoccupation with factory labour could explain the unraveling of the mainstream Left in India, a country where over 90 per cent of the workforce is employed in the informal sector and outside the purview of traditional forms of organisation.

Professor Harvey is at his best when he's puncturing some of capitalism's more egregious fictions, such as the rise of the anti-poverty industry. "Anti-poverty organisations are required to do their work without ever interfering in the further accumulation of wealth from which they derive their sustenance," he writes in the chapter on "prospects for a happy but contested future". "If everyone who worked in an anti-poverty organisation converted overnight to an anti-wealth politics we would soon find ourselves living in a very different world," he adds.

So, as Lenin would ask, what is to be done? The answer, when it comes, is a bit disappointing: "A secular revolutionary humanism that can ally with those religious humanisms to counter alienation in its many forms and to radically change the world from its anti-capitalist ways."

But what makes Professor Harvey so sure that the "masses" are alienated and dehumanised? Or that their forms of resistance are scattered and futile? Much of the despair in the book seems to stem from Professor Harvey's reflexive suspicion of anarchy and his inability to make sense of the restlessness rippling through urban centres across the developing world.

Professor Harvey is onto something when he says, "the existing mode of production and its current political articulations define both the spaces and the forms of its primary forms of opposition", or decentralised production gives rise to decentralised networked opposition. But he walks away from that insight without fleshing it out fully, concerned that a million self-directed mutinies will only dissipate revolutionary fervour.

Professor Harvey's book carries within it a sense of melancholia prompted by the hollowing out of solidarities and institutions forged by his generation. But today's young workers don't carry those burdens, nor do they have the comfort of nostalgia. Perhaps, then, it is too early to write off their own dreams of utopia.