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On Sraffa’s Trail

David Harvey recalls a lifetime of encounters, actual and intellectual, with the enigmatic Piero Sraffa. Interlocutor of Wittgenstein, Keynes and Robinson; devastating critic of neoclassical economics; helpmeet of Gramsci and rescuer of his Prison Notebooks. Reflections on an éminence grise of twentieth-century intellectual life.

Reply to Riley

Responding to Dylan Riley’s critique, Harvey extricates Marx’s double-edged law of profit—a falling rate and rising mass—from discussion of capitalist counter-measures. Competitive innovation, Eastern massification and the pay-offs for capital of speculative infrastructure spending.

Rate and Mass

If capital is value in motion, what is the fundamental contradiction that propels it? A reading of the Grundrisse as Marx’s break with Hegel and Ricardo, pitting the falling rate of profit against the growing mass of capital and its global upshots—from surplus sinks to credit cycles.

Value in Motion

How to re-engineer the compound-growth spiral of the capital- accumulation process? A global blueprint for challenging the profit motive, pitting process against the atomism of the neoclassical tradition, in the search for a workable use-value alternative.

The Right to the City

Examining the link between urbanization and capitalism, David Harvey suggests we view Haussmann’s reshaping of Paris and today’s explosive growth of cities as responses to systemic crises of accumulation—and issues a call to democratize the power to shape the urban experience.

Reinventing Geography

Interview with the leading practitioner of a materialism Marxists forgot. What happens when space, not time, becomes the axis of radical analysis? From post-war planning to the cities of European literature, the limits of over-accumulation to the flux of postmodernity, David Harvey talks about his work and what it has tracked.