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HOME ABOUT ARCHIVE SIDECAR CONTRIBUTORS SUBSCRIBE YOUR ACCOUNT DAVID HARVEY VALUE IN MOTION The covid-19 pandemic has plunged the world into the worst economic crisis in the history of capital. Forty million people lost their jobs overnight in the United States; at the nadir, its gdp shrank by 32 per cent compared to 2019. Swathes of the global economy were decimated, from airports and airlines to taxis, ‘hospitality’ and the entertainments sector. Countries that possessed some degree of monetary sovereignty, notably the us, ran up huge debts largely funded by printing their own money at a frantic pace. The rest of the world—from Brazil to Turkey and Nigeria—had to borrow up to the hilt in us dollars. Private creditors are already on record for trying to extract blood from a stone in interest payments.footnote1 Demand plummeted, as incomes crashed with the lockdowns. Supply chains worldwide were instantaneously disrupted, illustrating inversely the ease with which the virus went global. The few silver linings were mostly short-lived. Extractivism was put on the back foot—a halt to fracking in the West Texas Permian Basin, for example. Greenhouse-gas emissions fell and air quality improved: it was possible to breathe again in Delhi and Wuhan. Destructive forms of tourism disappeared, but then so did the revenues. The social value of a whole class of workers who provide the labour power to keep minimal services functioning was starkly foregrounded (without any improvement in their pay or conditions). Meanwhile, billionaires and corporations enriched themselves at the overflowing trough of public moneys, notionally provided to support the economy as a whole. The us stock markets also flourished, an artifice of central-bank policies to keep the investor class happy until longer-term accommodations could be worked out. What might these longer-term changes involve? While recognition is emerging within the ruling bloc that, from its own viewpoint, new measures are urgently required, critical perspectives on what would be needed to go beyond the present form of capitalism are conspicuously lacking. The discontents fueling mass protests before the pandemic—from Santiago to Beirut, Baghdad, Tehran, Paris, Quito, Khartoum and well beyond—have only sharpened in its aftermath. To grasp what lies behind these mass frustrations may offer clues as to where critical energies should best be concentrated. Laws of motion In part, these discontents can be traced to the neoliberal governing regimes of the past forty years. Under neoliberalism, the state’s goal is to support the growth and profitability of corporate capitalism and ensure the well-being of bondholders, lavishing all manner of favours upon the top 0.1 per cent. After forty years of austerity politics, labour and its institutions have been disempowered, public services have been gutted or privatized, hundreds of millions have been forced into precarious low-wage labour and debt peonage in order to survive, while capitalistic monopolies in energy, pharmaceuticals, communications, finance and education have been given free rein. When the virus struck, the public was for the most part defenceless, and states were unable to respond coherently. The international institutions set in place since 1945 conspicuously failed to provide elementary protections, let alone solutions. The failure to do anything about climate change had already demonstrated the emptiness of this policy box. A second source of discontent is the failure of the dominant economic model that is supposed to pay us reasonable remuneration in return for putting us to work—to put food on our tables, shirts on our backs, shoes on our feet, phones in our hands and roofs over our heads. Here we need some understanding of how the circulation and accumulation of capital works on a global scale—and in what ways it might be defective in satisfying human wants and needs. Capital is defined as value in motion, which immediately poses the question, where is it moving to? Figure 1 offers a formal representation of the paths of capital circulation, as Marx mapped them.footnote2 The free gifts of nature and of human nature provide two kinds of commodities: the means of production and labour power. In combination, these produce commodities whose value is realized in money form through the operation of effective consumer demand, driven by human wants, needs and desires, or by state and capitalist expenditure. Article figure NLR126-Harvey-figure1 At the outset, capital appears as money. The capitalist spends the money to buy commodities of equivalent value: labour power, machinery, semi-finished products, energy and raw materials. At this second ‘moment’ in the circulation process, value resides (as does capital) in these various commodities, waiting to be incorporated in production. In the next ‘moment’, workers use their labour power, under the direction of the capitalist, to re-shape the raw materials and semi-finished products to make a new commodity. This labour process preserves and transfers the pre-existing values, of labour power and the means of production, into the new commodity and adds a surplus value to it. Value, then, is a social relation, which operates as an ‘invisible thread’ within the circulation of capital, which takes on different material forms as it circulates. Value is initially defined as the cumulative ‘socially necessary labour time’—past and present labour—embodied in these new commodities. The surplus value arises because the labour power employed congeals more value in the commodity than is required to pay for the value of the labour power itself, which is fixed by the value of the commodities needed to reproduce the labourer at a given standard of living. The new commodity is then sold in the market, an operation that transforms value back into the money form. But there is now more money than at the beginning. ‘Profit’ is the money name and material representation of surplus value. Capitalists typically seek to maximize their amassed profit, either by raising the rate of exploitation of labour power or hiring more workers to increase production. The total value realized in money form is then distributed to the various factions that have claims upon it: to workers in the form of wages, to industrial producers as profits, to merchant capitalists as a monetary reward for facilitating sales, to bankers as interest on their loans, to landlords as rent and to the state as taxes. The capitalists, driven by competition, then reinvest to make more profit, and the process starts again. Repeated production of surplus value creates, however, a net accumulation of values in the form of compounding growth. The reproduction of capital becomes a never-ending spiral of endlessly expanding accumulation in space and time. Here we encounter a troubling feature of the dominant economic model: its spiral form of endless compound growth. The power of compound interest is as awesome as it is necessary to facilitate the reproduction of capital. Yet that doesn’t mean it is assured. Marx famously mocked Malthus’s extrapolations of exponential population growth and made fun of a certain Richard Price, who in 1772 wrote a tract projecting the consequences of compound interest: Money bearing compound interest increases at first slowly. But, the rate of increase being continually accelerated, it becomes in some time so rapid, as to mock all the powers of the imagination. One penny, put out at our Saviour’s birth to 5 per cent compound interest, would, before this time, have increased to a greater sum, than would be contained in a hundred and fifty millions of earths, all solid gold. But if put out to simple interest, it would, in the same time, have amounted to no more than seven shillings and four pence half-penny.footnote3 Marx’s argument was that the internal structures and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production would put an immediate check on any tendency towards exponential growth. He insisted that the impoverishment of the masses was a product of capital rather than of (human) nature. This did not prevent him from accepting that population growth was a necessary pre-condition for the perpetuation of capital accumulation ‘without limit’. He also recognized that the thirst for surplus value meant that ‘every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome’: the limitless and boundless character of value, and its monetary expression, perpetually sought to circumvent or transcend anything that might stand in the way of its further expansion.footnote4 As long as the world’s money was tied, however loosely, to the global gold supply, there was a material and physical check upon compounding monetary growth. However, ever since the gold standard was abandoned on 15 August 1971, there has been exponential growth in world money (see Figure 2)—matched by the exponential growth of global indebtedness. But all this money and credit has to go somewhere and be deployed to do something. So the spiral form seizes hold of the world’s lands, water and atmosphere and continuously expands their uses; it takes over production, consumption, distribution, reinvestment, assets and finance, in every nook and cranny of the world. Article figure NLR126-Harvey-figure2 The impact has been dramatic. In 1950, total global annual gdp was around $4 trillion. By 2000 it had expanded to $40 trillion, and in 2020 stands close to $80 trillion (in constant 1990 dollars), in effect doubling every 25 years. Over the next quarter-century, the capitalist system will be driven to try to find profitable ways to produce and reproduce goods and services to the monetary value of $160 trillion. By 2100, it will need to absorb $640 trillion. The implications are daunting. The spiral of plastic consumption—starting in 1950, and expanding at an annual compound rate of some 7 per cent—not only deposits piles of trash across land and ocean, but threatens to shroud the earth in a film of microplastic particles, with unknown consequences for planetary health. Greenhouse-gas emissions and air pollution will rise proportionately if capital seeks to satisfy growth targets by doubling the numbers of automobiles and airline flights over the next 25 years. The exponential expansion of capital re-shapes the quality of daily life, as investment flows into channels that culminate in instantaneous short-term consumption. Guy Debord’s prescient critique of the ‘society of the spectacle’ in 1967 little guessed how far and fast it would go. International tourism—a form of instantaneous consumption—has nearly doubled from 800 million to 1.4 billion trips over the last decade, with concomitant implications for infrastructure, cruise ships and air travel. The Netflix economy, culture industries and social media propagate collective forms of instantaneous mass consumption, while daily news and politics is turned into perpetual spectacle. ‘Experiential’ forms of consumerism have attracted vast investments. If capital returned to making only things, it would go out of business. The disruption of travel and entertainment—restaurants, festivals, sporting and cultural spectacles, conventions—by covid-19 has thus sharply aggravated the current crisis of global capital accumulation. The sectors that took a leading role in channelling the growth syndrome and absorbing surplus capital post-2008 have been brought to a shuddering halt. Fifteen million employees in America’s restaurant sector are out of work. The economies of cities like Barcelona, Venice and even New York, Paris and London have been shattered. Does the only answer lie in a forced revival of global tourism and low-wage sandwich chains? That is what international finance capital and its politicians will almost certainly seek. Systemic thinking How should we conceptualize the relations involved in the exponential expansion of capital? In Marx’s thinking, it is the totality that matters—the fluid and continuous character of value circulation, rather than the moments of transition in the flow. Since the 17th century, however, Western science has tended to think in terms of independent entities—atoms, molecules, organisms—endowed with certain powers that intersect with other entities to create physical and material processes. There is no necessity for the interactions to be anything other than occasional, episodic and maybe discontinuous. Similarly, human beings are construed as individual persons, entities endowed with a consciousness and (free) will, acting in the world and initiating certain processes—the circulation of capital, struggle for existence or search for love—driven by the rational pursuit of individual interests. For purposes of state administration, persons are construed as ‘things’, with measurable attributes. Yet we cannot understand ourselves outside of the processes and inter-relations in which we live, as living, breathing, thinking and acting beings. People are starving not because they are inherently made that way, but because the flow of available food dries up. The rich become rich because of their relative position in the processes of market exchange. Rousseau had conceived of individuals as pre-existing ‘noble savages’, endowed with certain inalienable ‘natural’ rights, who collectively formed something called society. This, for Rousseau, was what the original ‘social contract’ was about. For Marx, humankind began as a collectivity. The possibility for individuality depended upon the expanding practices of market exchange, monetization and private-property rights that arose in Western Europe from the feudal period onwards, producing a context in which ideas of individualism could take root. Liberal theory, he argues in the Grundrisse, is not an idealist construction descended from the heavens, but historically grounded in ‘the concrete abstraction’ entailed in acts of market exchange.footnote5 Contrary to received opinion, Marx put a high value on individual liberty and freedom. The problem as he saw it was that liberal theory pretended that liberty and freedom were natural attributes that had to be protected from, for example, the intrusions of state power. The question for him was how the world that liberal theorists envisaged, built upon such natural virtues, could end up producing wage slavery, increasing social inequalities, mindless consumerism for the rich and debt peonage for the masses. The liberal theorists skirted an obvious contradiction: if everyone had the right of property to what they created by mixing their labour with the land, then why were the workers so impoverished and deprived of property when employed by capital? This was the question that so exercised Ricardian socialists of Marx’s time. It would take instead, Marx insisted, a massive collective effort to create a world in which individual liberty and freedom—measured as disposable free time for all—might be materially achievable. In Marx’s world, the same ‘thing’ becomes different when embedded in different processes. If we see someone digging a ditch, we can describe the physical action in minute detail. But the meaning of the action cannot be determined from the action itself. It will vary, depending on whether the digger is a wage labourer, exploited by capital, a serf doing the bidding of a lord, a member of a collective summoned to help on a communal project or an eccentric aristocrat keeping fit by digging a ditch and filling it up again just for fun. The meaning of the ditch digging depends upon the social relations within which it is embedded. So it is with economic categories. A road is part of society’s consumption fund when used for taking walks, but becomes part of the fixed capital of production when used to transport goods from the factory to the market.footnote6 A house is part of the consumption fund when used as a dwelling, but part of the fixed capital of production when turned into a sweatshop. If economic development depends upon a massive creation of fixed capital infrastructures, then one way to do that is to convert the uses of existing things from consumption to production, rather than restricting current consumption and diverting productive capacities to make new infrastructure. During the Industrial Revolution, Britain did a lot of this kind of conversion: data from the 16th century onwards show no sign of any surge in fixed capital formation, contrary to the influential arguments of Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth.footnote7 One of the current aims of microfinance is to convert every peasant hut into fixed capital, while devaluing the fixed capital in factories of the advanced capitalist countries by turning them into condos in the consumption fund. The quantity of capital in society can lurch up and down in Marxian theory, depending upon the uses of things—roads, houses, sewing machines. But in bourgeois economic theory, capital is construed as a measurable and definable thing, a clear and definable ‘factor of production’ that exists no matter what the process. Along with the other key factors of production—land and labour—capital can be inserted into productive activity to create an object of utility, whose value will be established in the marketplace according to the laws of supply and demand. The supply price of commodities is constructed out of the marginal utilities of the three primary factors of production, construed as a stock of things, while the demand price depends on the utility to consumers of the commodity, likewise a ‘thing’. It is the law of supply and demand activity in the market to arrive at an equilibrium price, which is the measure of value in bourgeois theory. In this formulation, the world of things takes precedence over processes. Capitalism is construed as the bringing together of pre-existing things—the factors of production—into a particular kind of social process, such as that described in a free market society. Value and price This theoretical framing contrasts radically with Marx’s process-based thinking and his historical and socially contingent understanding. Both modes of thought have their advantages and disadvantages. The central problem for the Marxist approach lies in the difficulty of using value theory to unpack the material laws of motion of capital and its consequences. Value is an immaterial but objective social relation which arises out of the monetization of acts of exchange.footnote8 The immateriality itself does not pose a particular problem. There are, after all, innumerable key concepts in common parlance—political power, nationalism, gender identity—that denote immaterial social relations which cannot be measured directly, but which have clear and undeniable objective consequences in daily life. Thoughts, for example, are immaterial but often materially consequential. The general approach to such immaterial but objective concepts is to develop measurable material indicators for them, even as we concede that such indices are never identical with what they seek to represent. Marx’s value theory has, however, been widely misunderstood. Many economists—including those of a Marxist persuasion—see it as an attempt to ground a theory of the relative prices of commodities. Marx on occasion toyed with the idea, suggesting at one point that if a pair of shoes cost twice as much as a shirt, it was because the shoes congealed twice as much socially necessary labour time. In developing his numerical examples to illustrate relationalities, Marx frequently appealed to value as a (fictional) universal numeraire for convenience. Marxist economists have frequently adopted this tactic in their accounts of his approach.footnote9 But Marx himself firmly rejected the idea that value could be used to explain relative prices. Others have seen his value theory as a continuation and adaptation of Ricardo’s labour theory of value. While that was certainly Marx’s starting point, it was an opening salvo in his critique of classical political economy, including its value theory, and not his final conclusion. Marx’s value theory is not a labour theory of value. It is, rather, a theory of the processes by which capital rules over the conditions of life and labour of the working classes. Marx was very clear that the value theory he was advancing was not a universal one, but particular to a capitalist mode of production.footnote10 To be a productive labourer—to produce value—under capitalism, he argues, is ‘a misfortune’ because the workers are destined to produce surplus value for the capitalists and never for themselves.footnote11 The abolition of capital therefore entails the abolition of value embedded in its circulation. The conditions that Engels encountered in the factories and back streets of Manchester were intolerable; Marx, having read the compelling reports of the Factory Inspectors and Public Health officials, agreed. That economic model had to go—the value embedded in the circulation of capital had to be abolished. The production of value and surplus value was the fount of all that was evil about British industrialism, as it is today in the factories of Bangladesh and China’s massive manufacturing complexes. The concept of value that Marx sets out—not an idealist formulation, but a reconstruction of how capital actually assigns values to both processes and things in the course of its motion—demonstrates the alienation of all that might be positive in human labour. Both Marx and Engels lauded the role of labour in history. They depicted it as potentially noble and inherently creative—the ‘form-giving fire’ that breathes life into the world around us.footnote12 But under capital, these qualities of labour are debased, alienated and appropriated. Socialism ultimately aims for the negation of capital’s value theory and the liberation of labour’s potentialities. The alienated experience of the worker has to be de-alienated and transcended, and a distinctively socialist value theory needs to be consciously constructed as one of the main tasks in any transition to socialism. Imagine an alternative circulation process regulated by a different law of value, which allocates labouring tasks to individuals across a given population on an egalitarian basis, according to their capacities and powers, while distributing the use values produced according to some measure of needs.footnote13 The aim of this process would be to produce the use values required to provide everyone basic education, health care, housing, nutrition and transportation—not as commodities for sale but as goods to be freely used. In elaborating this alternative law of value, there is much to be learned from the study of alternative and non-alienated metabolic relations to nature (as some radical ecologists propose) and non-alienated processes of social reproduction (of the sort that some feminists seek), while drawing upon humanity’s long history of cultural evolution and diversity for inspiration. Equilibrium and crisis Meanwhile bourgeois economists have their own problems when it comes to value theory. These are due in part to the difficulty of deriving macro-economic postulates from micro-economic theories of firms and individual behavior. In the macro-economic field, the critical problem is how to value capital as a pristine factor of production prior to its insertion and incorporation into market-based production processes.footnote14 When capital is in money form, there is no problem. But when it exists as machines, buildings, infrastructures and the like, then there is no way to establish the value of this fixed-capital stock independently of the market price of the commodities it helps to produce. The theory that the price realized in the market is the product of the coming together of the three core factors of production—land, labour and capital—breaks down. Piero Sraffa in his famous little book, The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, proved without doubt that the value of outputs simply echoed the value of the inputs as determined by the value of the final product.footnote15 The whole of neo-classical macro-economic theory is founded on a tautology. Faced with this seemingly devastating conclusion, bourgeois economists collectively chose to forget about it. They continued their analyses as if the problem did not exist. So, while there is a healthy debate on value theory in Marxist circles, there is total silence as to the significance of the ‘capital controversy’ that followed the publication of Sraffa’s book in 1960. A perfect illustration of this problem occurred in 2008. The banks had huge inventories of titles to foreclosed houses on their books and they had to find some way to value the houses—which would provide the collateral for any state bail-out—in the absence of a market. The banks resorted to a mixture of magic, guesswork and ‘expert’ opinion.footnote16 When the ‘Committee to Save the World’ (read: Committee to Save the Banks)—constituted by Treasury Secretary Paulson, Fed Chair Bernanke and the New York Fed’s Geithner—chose not to believe the valuations in Lehman Brothers’ accounts and refused the loan required, the world was plunged into a massive financial and commercial crisis. It is at such moments that many commentators began to wonder whether Marx, the pre-eminent student of tendencies towards disequilibrium and crisis formation under capitalism, might have something intelligent to say. Bourgeois macro-economics is equilibrium-based in its mode of thinking and can operate well as long as the economic system seems to be operating in a mode close to balanced growth. Bourgeois theory knows how to tinker with the details and correct for minor distortions—for example, devising policies to deal with the supposed trade-off between unemployment and inflation described by the Phillips Curve.footnote17 But when disequilibrium shifts from minor oscillations to massive and cumulative divergences and crises, of the sort that occurred in 2008, the bourgeois conceptual apparatus proves useless. In the face of such difficulties, Marx noted, economists typically proclaim that it would not be this way if the economy would only perform according to their text booksfootnote18 Keynes’s preferred explanation lay in the wayward psychology of expectations in times of uncertainty, whereby investment lags, production is curbed, wages and employment stagnate, effective demand drops and profits fall, leading to further declines in expectations.footnote19 The result is a self-reinforcing downward spiral of economic activity, which only state intervention and deficit financing can break. (It is striking that in recent years the Nobel Prize in so-called economics has been awarded to psychologists rather than economists.) Both Keynes and Ricardo rely on extra-economic mechanisms to explain crises and recessions that exceed those of the ‘normal’ business cycle. Ironically, the only people who took Sraffa’s findings seriously were Marxist economists. Ian Steedman’s landmark Marx After Sraffa (1977) showed that the then-dominant version of Marx’s value theory, which saw it as founding a theory of relative prices, could not be sustained in the face of Sraffa’s meticulous critique and formal mathematical proof. The whole history of Marxist economics, from Bortkiewicz at the end of the 19th century to Paul Sweezy in the mid-20th, was founded on an error. Marx’s political economy and its distinctive value theory had to be abandoned, Steedman maintained, leaving Marx’s moral criticism of the evils of capital and its brutal exploitations intact, but in desperate need of a re-founding on an alternative ontological basis.footnote20 But it is clear from the Grundrisse that Marx denied that value theory had anything to do with relative prices and that, moreover, he would not have been at all surprised by Sraffa’s depiction of the tautological basis of bourgeois economic reasoning. When we model an economic system as a self-contained totality—as Sraffa in effect did, and which indeed is what all theoretical economists do—then at the core of that totality lies a set of relations that is necessarily tautological. Sraffa’s depiction of circular economic reasoning is in fact pre-figured in Marx’s ‘Introduction’ to the Grundrisse: ‘Not only is production immediately consumption and consumption immediately production, not only is production a means for consumption and consumption the aim of production . . . but also, each of them, apart from them being immediately the other, and apart from mediating the other, in addition to this creates the other in completing itself, and creates itself as the other.’ Therefore, ‘without production no consumption; without consumption, no production.’ Marx looks at the relations between production and distribution in the same tautological way, but he does not walk away from the problem and pretend it doesn’t exist. Instead, he embraces it and seeks a way to break open these relations as different and distinctive ‘moments’ in a unitary process. This allows him to explore the ‘contradictory unities’ between the different moments within the economy as a whole. ‘The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity.’footnote21 This perspective helps to clarify the actual dynamics of capital accumulation. When China faced a collapse of its consumer export market to the United States in 2008, it immediately experienced a radical contraction in the realm of production with further devastating impacts upon the consumption of raw materials, as well as the diminishing final consumption of suddenly unemployed Chinese workers. The prc saved its own economy as well as global capitalism by launching a vast programme of productive (not initially final) consumption through rapid urbanization and huge investments in the built environment, which immediately produced its ‘other’ in the form of a massive expansion of final consumption. But in building some 20,000 miles of high-speed rail network in ten years, it had to create the consumption of rail travel to match, otherwise the production would come to naught. Most of the trains are now packed. China has produced new consumption as the ‘other’ of the production required to counter the collapse of its ‘other’—consumer demand in the United States. This is, of course, a much-oversimplified reconstruction, but it illustrates how the dialectical relations between production and consumption (realization) within a totality actually operate.footnote22 In the same way, distribution, exchange and competition are foundational for a full analysis not only of what happened, but of what to do under crisis conditions. It may be of significance in the current situation that China’s path through the pandemic to a resumption of growth may be sustaining a capitalist revival, but this time under distinctly Chinese modes of management. From this perspective, it is Steedman and Cohen that are mistaken. For Marx, economic instability and crises are primarily produced by the ever-present contradictions between different ‘moments’ within the economic system. External shocks can and do occur, of course. Volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, droughts and pathogens may not be altogether external, since human interventions often set the stage for disruptive events. But it is internal blockages at any point in the circulation of capital, depicted in Figure 1, that directly spawn crises of accumulation, resulting in sometimes massive devaluations of capital of the sort experienced in the 1930s and 2008 and 2020. There are many potential internal barriers to continuous and untroubled accumulation. Capitalists armed with money capital may not find enough commodities in the market—because of labour shortages, or exorbitant prices for raw materials and energy—to set up production. Stoppages can occur at the point of production: a workers’ strike or power-cut to machinery. Market conditions may inhibit the realization of value because the effective monetary demand—wants, needs, desires—may be lacking. If value cannot be monetized by a sale in the market, then it is no longer value. Problems can also occur in the field of distribution. Banks may take to financing landowners and speculators, or lend to the state to finance wars, while ignoring the needs of industrial capital. Above all, the dynamics of endogenously generated technological changes can produce strong disruptions to capital accumulation, along with general breakdowns in circulation. There are various points where capital circulation can encounter limitations on the capacity to speed up or deepen the processes of accumulation. The metabolic relation to nature, conditions of social reproduction, provision of adequate infrastructures—both physical (transport networks, urban forms) and social (education, demographic practices)—or seemingly insurmountable cultural presuppositions (regarding the mobility of labour, for example): all of these pose potential barriers that capital must negotiate or overcome if it is to survive. The water-cycle analogy Mainstream economists generally consider Marx unscientific. Their dominant method is mechanical and frequently positivist, modeled after Newtonian physics and its mathematical elaborations. Yet while this Newtonian-mathematical model of scientific enquiry was hegemonic in the natural sciences, there has always been a strong undercurrent of alternative process-based evolutionary thinking, as represented by Darwin, whom Marx admired as much for his method as for his findings. This is the scientific tradition within which Marx can best be located. His method chimes with that articulated by Alfred North Whitehead in The Concept of Nature or Process and Reality. Reading David Bohm’s exposition of quantum theory, Carlo Rovelli on the physics of time, or Levins and Lewontin on The Dialectical Biologist, one recognizes parallels and analogies to Marx’s mode of scientific thought. Much of the work done in contemporary neurosciences moves beyond simple dichotomies, such as that of brain and mind, to more dialectical formulations. Marx’s eco-systemic conception of the totality in the Grundrisse finds echoes in much contemporary ecological and biological thinking.footnote23 There are, for example, broad analogies between Marx’s account of the circulation of capital and the long-standing scientific representation of the earth’s hydrological cycle as a continuous process.footnote24 The seeming unfamiliarity of Marx’s method dissolves in the light of a widely accepted scientific representation of water’s circulation. It turns out, for example, that the question ‘what is water’ is just as difficult to answer definitively as the question ‘what is value’. In the water cycle, h2o takes on different material forms—liquid, gaseous, invisible, visible—linked through a variety of metamorphoses, in much the same way that capital circulates through its different forms—money, production, commodity. Periodic excesses in the water cycle, in the form of floods and hurricanes, as well as general ongoing turbulence, mirror the instabilities of our economic system. The analogy is as instructive as it is remarkable. In the case of water, we can chart the impacts and shocks to the circulatory system caused by human initiatives and interventions: dam-building, the diversion of water for irrigation or human consumption, the depletion of aquifers, the decline in snow packs through climate change, the radical reconfiguration of evapotranspiration through land-use management, the contamination of water from mining, agriculture and waste disposal, and the declining quality of water supplies due to atmospheric pollution. The circulation of water takes multiple paths, with different turnover times, incorporating all sorts of diversions and short-cuts; much the same can be said of capital circulation. Figure 1 envisages a capitalist mode of production operating in a pure and simplified state, as a cycle, not a spiral. But we also need to look at the diversions, disruptions, contaminations and counteracting forms that arise as we expand the analysis of how capital circulates. In the same way that evapotranspiration short-circuits the flow of h2o to take water back into the atmosphere without going through the oceans, so financiers may short circuit the M–C–M + ∆m structure of commodity exchange for a M–M + ∆m structure of pure financial flows. Finance capitalists may lend to merchants who in turn lend to producers, or to landlords for real-estate purchases that are then used as collateral to borrow more money. Credit arrangements are crucial for workers as consumers, when it comes to purchasing big-ticket items like consumer durables, cars and houses; the mortgage market makes up a large part of the increasing mass of asset values. Miniscule features of capital circulation in Marx’s time have become massive, increasingly monstrous aspects of contemporary accumulation. Capital now circulates and value is appropriated without necessarily being involved in production. The next step, therefore, is to incorporate more practical features of how these relations are being worked out, both historically and geographically. In so doing, we will find ourselves increasingly studying the intersections between capital circulation and accumulation, on the one hand, and the other relevant processes of circulation, including that of the water cycle or greenhouse-gas emissions. The increasing difficulty of assuring adequate global water supplies intersects with the problems posed by the impacts of endless accumulation. As the totality of capital as a system takes shape, both in theory and in reality, we need to explore all the consequences of adhering to the current economic model. The question of viable alternatives is then posed. But that demands a wholly new theoretical framing. If the mass unrest around the world is a sign that the dominant economic model is not working for the mass of humanity, and if the spiral form of growth is destroying the planet, there is an urgent need to identify possible alternatives and chart feasible paths to their construction. The bourgeois hope that tinkering with the details to solve problems is fading. Capital’s value theory must be replaced by a theoretical structure that concentrates on feasible use-value configurations to support adequate human life everywhere. The profit motive that lies at the root of exponential growth has to be spiked at every turn. Continuity in the flow of human life is far more important than continuity in the flow of endlessly accumulating capital. The latter, which for the past two hundred years has been mobilized as the primary means for satisfying the wants and needs of the privileged classes, with sufficient crumbs from their table to placate the masses, has suffered a dialectical inversion. Endless and compounding capital growth and accumulation now constitutes the pre-eminent danger to the continuation of all forms of human life. That is the longue durée problem that the coronavirus has so clearly exposed. It needs to be confronted in a world where capital’s growing need for speed-up dictates increasing short-termism in political judgements. 1 Exhibit A: Argentina from 2001 onwards, after nine defaults it seems creditors may settle for payment at 55 cents on the dollar as of 2020. 2 For a full description, see David Harvey, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason, paperback edn, London 2019. 3 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, London 1973, p. 842. 4 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 400–11. 5 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 244–5. 6 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 524–31, 724–51. 7 The evidence on fixed capital formation can be found in M. M. Postan and E. E. Rich, eds, The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 2: Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages, Cambridge 1952; and Postan, Fact and Relevance: Essays on Historical Method, Cambridge 1971. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, London 1960. 8 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, London 1976, pp. 128–39; see also the Appendix in Harvey, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason, 2019. 9 Ian Steedman, ed., The Value Controversy, London 1981. 10 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 776. 11 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 644. 12 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 361. 13 I am drawing here on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, New York 1971. 14 Eric Maskin and Amartya Sen et al., The Arrow Impossibility Theorem, New York 2014. 15 Piero Sraffa, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, Cambridge 1960. 16 Aaron Glantz, Homewreckers, New York 2019. 17 Robert Gordon, ‘The History of the Phillips Curve: Consensus and Bifurcation’, Economica, vol. 78, no. 309, January 2011, pp. 10–50. 18 Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part 2, New York 1969, p. 500. 19 John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, New York 1936. 20 This critique found support from Marxist analytical philosophers like G. A. Cohen and Jon Elster, who denied any validity to Marx’s adherence to what they maintained was a totally incoherent and illogical dialectical method; we had to learn to read Marx with the tools of analytical philosophy and positivism. See G. A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, Princeton 1978; Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx, London 1985. 21 Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 88–93, 99. 22 For my views on the role of China see Abstract from the Concrete, Harvard University Graduate School of Design 2016. 23 I surveyed some of these connections in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Oxford 1996. See also Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, London 2018. 24 I elaborate further on this relation in Harvey, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason, 2019, pp. 1–7. 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