The Good and the Bad in David Harvey’s Popular Marxism

In June 2019, David Harvey, the well-known Marxist, gave an interview to Arnau Barquer, an editor of Catarsi magazine in Spain. His interview was later republished by Jacobin. The title of the script of the interview was ‘Karl Marx Is Useful for Our Time, Not Just His’ (Harvey, 2019a). In the interview, Harvey says that ‘Marx is more relevant today than ever before’. I entirely agree with Harvey on this. ¹

This interview raises many important issues concerning both capitalism and Marxist thought. These issues should be critically discussed. Non-Marxists think that Marxism is one homogeneous dogmatic body of thinking. It is not. Marxism believes in Marx’s principle of ruthless criticism of the world and of the ideas about it. ² It is in this spirit that I engage in a comradely critique of Harvey’s interview, but in a manner that is not strictly academic. ³

I select specific points that Harvey makes in the interview, to which I then respond. The original lines from Harvey’s interview are provided in smaller front. Harvey’s ideas and my comments are organized under several main themes, although this is not how the interview was organized. My presentation is admittedly polemical in the following sense:

A polemic is a militant reply, in the form of reasoned arguments, to attacks upon a position of proposition worthy of defense. . . . What is decisive is not the manner [whether mild or harsh] but the gist of the matter. Have the pros and cons of the question been trenchantly set forth so that the issues at stake become clarified by the confrontation of opposing views? (Novack, 1978: 39)

The remainder of this essay apart from the conclusion is divided into five main sections which deal with the main themes from Harvey’s interview: the nature of the working class; uneven development; crisis of capitalist profitability; Left politics and theory; and finally, the meaning of Marxist theory. I explain what Harvey says about these important issues in this major interview. I also direct the reader to what Harvey has to say about these topics in his major writings, although I do not discuss these writings in this article. ⁴ I then show how it is that many of his views are mistaken, both intellectually and in terms of revolutionary socialist practice. In doing so, I contextualize his ideas in relation to some of the existing Marxist work, including Marx’s thought and the Lenin legacy.

Is There a Working Class?

In the 1980s–90s there was a lot of deindustrialization in the West, much of it due to technological change . . .

The classical working class no longer exists in many countries . . . Of course, it hasn’t gone away entirely, but it’s been seriously undermined.

This statement implies that capitalism has changed in many countries (and Harvey means especially, advanced countries such as the United States) so much since Marx’s time that the working class that Marx talked about no longer exists. ⁵ This sort of claim has been made by many leftists.

There are certain things that are constant (e.g. capitalists’ need, owing to the coercive laws of competition, to obtain an average rate of profit by exploiting the working class). There are other things that change. Suppose someone thinks that to be a worker, one has to work in a factory. Then if the number of factory workers has decreased in a country such as the United States, this can lead to the conclusion such as Harvey’s that the working class is disappearing or shrinking or changing in fundamental ways. In this case, what actually needs to change is the wrong view of the working class. If one’s view of the fundamental nature of the working-class changes, that does not mean that the working class itself has changed in fundamental ways, any more than a change in the view about the geometric form of the planet Earth means the actual change in this form.

There is no such thing as the classical or non-classical working class, except in a strictly empirical sense, in the sense of occupation, and so on. The working class consists of men and women (and many children) who (a) lack control over means of production, (b) therefore must depend on the sale of their labour power to be able to obtain access to their means of subsistence to survive, (c) have to surrender a large part of what they produce to those who control means of production in the workplace and (d) have effectively little control either over production and exchange, and indeed over state power (Das, 2017c). ⁶ This was true in Marx’s time. This was true in the 1970s (when Harvey pioneeringly and innovatively began his turn to Marxism when few men and women did from his own discipline of Geography). And, this is true now.

During Marx’s time and earlier, humanity needed food, drinks, shelter, clothes, hospitals, libraries, roads, theatres, and it needs these things now. ⁷ And these things did not fall from heaven or classrooms or academic conferences or the Parliaments then. They do not do so now. These things – in their material and other forms – have to be produced on the basic of metabolic interaction between nature and labour (manual and cognitive) then as now. Production – including the production of the means of subsistence – required not only the means of production, including the material resources extracted from nature, but also what Marx called social intercourse or, what are basically social relations of production or class relations. This was true during Marx’s time and earlier. This is true now. The working-class people – men and women, blacks and whites, gays and straights, Hindus, Christians and Muslims, low castes and high castes and so on – produce food, clothes, shelter and roads, etc., but their needs remain unmet, and they live a life of precarity. This was then as now. Whether people work with a plough or pliers or a pen, or whether they use their arms or artificial intelligence (AI), is a different matter. Whether they work at a bank or inside a mine or on a farm is a different matter too.

If the working class is seen as industrial workers (i.e. those who produce, for example, toys or toothpastes, etc.), ⁸ that is a narrow – conjunctural – view of the working class, with problematic political implications: the political pre-eminence of the working class is reduced. Besides, the idea that the working class is disappearing betrays a confused and nationalistic conceptualization of it. Based on the empirical evidence from just a few countries, where a small minority of the global population live (i.e. mainly the imperialist world), such a view about the working class is deeply Euro-American-centric: do millions of industrial workers in China (the economic size of which has now overtaken that of the United States in PPP terms), India and other parts of the Global South not matter? Harvey, the geographer, shows here a restricted form of an approach to society – geographical imagination – that he has himself championed since the 1970s. In a properly construed geographical imagination, what happens in a country or a city, including the nature of the working class, must be examined (a) on the basis of general claims about fundamental mechanisms of society and (b) seen as a part of, and as ultimately determined by, the global-scale process, because the global scale is a mighty independent scale. ⁹

Uneven Geographical Development

My reading and presentation of Marx has always been related to creating an understanding of him that is relevant to uneven geographical development and urbanization.

These two lines in the interview summarize a massive amount of work Harvey has done in the last 50 years on the topic. He remains a major figure when it comes to the understanding of uneven development and urbanization in (advanced) capitalism. He admirably talked about it in the early 1970s when few did. ¹⁰ But one can generally read his work on this topic without necessarily having to consider such important processes as value relations, including antagonistic objective relations of class exploitation (Das, 2017b). ¹¹ For Harvey, uneven development is basically because of geographically uneven existence of productive forces and of accumulation and devaluation, caused by the geographical centralization (including urbanization of capital) and decentralization tendencies in capitalist space-economy.

Harvey admirably points to something that is real and palpable. But the reality of uneven development is much more complicated than Harvey thinks. The key here is Marx’s concept of subsumption of labour, a concept that Harvey (1982), almost completely mischaracterizes even in his best work (Limits to Capital). Harvey’s thinking about uneven development has little to say about the combined character of development. ¹² This serious neglect is because of his consistent disregard for a large part of the Marxist tradition (e.g. Lenin and his legacy as developed after the mid-1920s in the Bolshevik tradition).

A few points may be made here concerning uneven development: (a) Methodologically, geographical uneven must be explained in terms of the interaction between processes that are aspatial and the processes that are specific to particular cities, places and countries. To say that uneven development happens because things are different in different places/countries is an exercise in geographical empiricism. (b) Given ontological stratification in the world, the category of unevenness must apply to social relations of capitalism and attendant mechanisms, and not just to the outcomes of their operation such as uneven economic development of productive forces. (c) A fuller picture of uneven development must include, apart from Harvey’s claims, discussions on the uneven occurrence in changes in the class relations within the capitalist social formation ¹³ and associated changes in the development of productive forces. Uneven development must be seen partly as an uneven transition to the real subsumption of labour in production at multiple scales, where that unevenness is in part caused by the unevenness in class struggle against capitalism (Das, 2017b, 2017c Chapter 8). (d) Uneven development must be explained by the dialectics of urbanization of capital and ruralization of capital, and not just by the former on which Harvey has famously focussed. ¹⁴ (e) And, uneven development must be seen partly as a product of uneven state intervention within a country and of exploitative flows of surplus – appropriated from wage-workers and petty producers by capital – from less developed to more developed regions/countries, mediated by the state. ¹⁵

The Rate/Mass of Profit

A lot of people talk about the rate of profit, but it’s control of the mass of profit that really decides who the important players in the capitalist system are.

If capitalism exhibits uneven geographical development, it also exhibits temporal unevenness in profitability and indeed a long-term decline in the average rate of profit. It is first the rate of profit that takes one to the question of the mass of profit, and we need to know if the rate of profit is falling and if it is, then the question is why. Harvey rejects the idea (explained in Capital vol 3) that the rate of profit tends to fall, ultimately, due to the c/v (the organic composition of capital) rising faster relative to the s/v (the rate of exploitation); Harvey is in favour of a complex version of what is effectively under-consumptionism. ¹⁶ Harvey ignores the fact that as the rate of profit falls, gradually the rate of increase in the mass of profit, and the mass of profit itself will also fall. ¹⁷

Left Politics

The Left hasn’t responded very well to the transformations that have been occurring within capitalism and is in danger of repeating some of its past mistakes.

[Because of the changes in the working class] the basis of traditional-left politics has disappeared along with it.

In the 1980s–90s there was a lot of deindustrialization in the West, much of it due to technological change, and the Left tried to defend against this in order to protect traditional working-class populations. But it lost that battle, losing a lot of credibility in the process.

If you look at the number of cities where tenants’ movements are beginning a real political push, it’s crazy for the Left to say they’re irrelevant.

We need a new form of left approach focused on what I’d call anti-capitalist politics: not simply focused on the workplace, but on the conditions of everyday life, of housing, of social provision, of concern for the environment, of cultural change and cultural transformation . . . . [G]iven the shift in interest away from the problems of the workplace to the problems of daily life in the city and affordable housing, the Left has to have a new politics that focuses on all this.

It is disappointing to hear Harvey’s long-standing rant, since at least the early 2000s, not only about the traditional or ‘classical’ working class disappearing (mentioned earlier) but also about what he thinks are the mistakes of the Left (by Left, he generally means the Marxist Left). Who exactly does he have in mind when he is hurling these accusations?

Where in the world does the communist movement ignore issues such as affordable housing or other such problems? The Left movement in India, for example, has been fighting against social oppression, introduction of irrationalism into the university curriculum, subordination of Muslims, land dispossession, privatization of electricity, for subsidized food and so on. A few years ago, a socialist organization (Socialist Equality Party) was actively involved in the fight against utility (water) shutoffs in Detroit (Jones, 2011). These are just two examples out of many. ¹⁸

Harvey talks about ‘the shift in interest away from the problems of the workplace to the problems of daily life in the city and affordable housing’. But what shift? Has the capitalism that Marx talked about changed so fundamentally that the problems which the working class faces in the workplace (the hidden abode of production), including its experience of all the capitalist methods of increasing the rate of exploitation, are not important anymore? Does the city, a product of what Harvey calls urbanization of capital, or does the daily life in the city, not include workplaces or sites of production of value and surplus value?

Harvey has not only been saying that the centre of society has moved from the workplace (read: production). He has also been espousing a shift of Left politics from the workplace to other spheres. While he rightly believes that one has to study the world to change it, his approach is a ‘negative proof’ of this: inadequate understanding leads to inadequate politics. He has been downplaying the central importance of commodity production and exchange on the basis of value, so he has been also downplaying class relations centred on property and production, including in his popular Marxist writings. ¹⁹ As a result he can be dismissive about the key importance of the most revolutionary anti-capitalist force, the working class.

In contrast to Harvey’s Marxism, the genuine Marxist tradition, classical Marxism, is clear about its politics. The Marxist view of politics, of what is to be done, says that:

1. class relations and capitalism must be overthrown as they cannot be reformed;

2. for this to happen what are needed are democratically-organized self-emancipatory struggles of workers and small-scale producers of different social backgrounds, and assisted and led by their parties, and,

3. the struggle for a new society must be a struggle for

4. economic-ecological-cultural concessions (e.g. a living wage; reduction in pollution levels; provision of means of cultural entertainment; affordable access to public spaces in the city) from the exploiting property-owning classes and their state,

5. as a part of the fight to abolish class relations and capitalism (Das, 2020b, 2020c).

Marxist Left politics must include fighting not only against exploitation and dispossession – that is, against low wages and adverse working conditions as aspects of ‘primary exploitation’ (exploitation in the workplace), against ‘secondary exploitation’ (in rental market, retail market, financial market, etc.) and against the dispossession of small-scale producers and those who use commons of various types – but also against social oppression, as a part of the fight against capitalist property relations. The best of the Left tradition after Marx, especially, the strand that Harvey generally has chosen to neglect (i.e. the Leninist legacy), aims to do just that, as ‘the tribune of the people’. So where is the basis of Harvey’s complaint against the Marxist Left, that it is just focussed on the workplace? The ‘shift’ from the workplace that Harvey has been advocating is a retrograde step. The objective implication of such a claim, where the reality of production of value and surplus value, and of production relations is under-stressed, whatever his subjective intention might be, is this: reproduction of a nicer form of capitalism. This implies that endorsement of the popular front where the working class is allied with progressive bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces and everyone else who has some problems with capitalism.

There is no need for the shift that Harvey advocates: Marxist politics is very dialectical as it already includes various aspects of people’s lives, and yet, it includes the centrality of production, and the site of production, and the social relations of production. ²⁰ If any shift is necessary, it is the shift from Left thinking such as Harvey’s which has reformist implications to an alternative thinking. The latter defends the ultimate causal primacy of production and production relations and aims to promote the project of revolutionary transcending of the capitalist system of production and exchange in order to establish socialism. As a part of the fight for socialism, the working masses must struggle for reforms – including employment for all, free education and healthcare for all, automatic inflation-adjusted rise in the nominal living wage for all, and so on, without any illusion that they will get what they demand. Even if they get some concessions, there will still be a distinction between living as better-fed slaves and living a life where they have control over the conditions of production and social surplus. When capitalism is on its death-bed (in terms of the long-term decline in capitalist profitability and in the investment in the production of commodities), the limits to reforms are even more serious than they have always been, including during Marx’s time. Marx’s point is that workers must demand improvement in their conditions but that they usually are able to wring only meagre concessions from capital (Marx, 1887: 315; 319). There is a reason for it. If concessions adversely affect the average rate of normal profit, concessions will be reduced/stopped, which means that: the interests of capital defended by the state and the interests of masses are fundamentally incompatible (Das, 2022a).

Leaving things up to market forces is a disaster, from the standpoint for [sic] delivering a decent living environment to all citizens independent of income, race, gender, and so on. You can do things like rent controls, though in the long run I don’t think that’s a solution insofar as there’s still the market.

Harvey makes many good points here about the market force. But these are good points when seen in abstraction from the other things that Harvey says. Being against the market is not necessarily being a Marxist. Polanyi was against the market as are his modern-day followers (e.g. Fred Block; Jamie Peck). To be a Marxist is to reject the relations of the market, property, and production in their capitalist form. A non-socialist state can regulate the market due to popular pressure, at least for some time. Regulation of dependence upon the market does not eliminate the dependence upon the market. And there is a distinction between regulation of the market by a capitalist state and that by a post-revolution transitional state. Also, there is a distinction between the market in which small-scale producers operate and the market that is dominated by big companies, including big banks. Does Harvey support the revolutionary socialization of these companies which dominate the market? Just being against the market is not enough. Harvey says.

To get a socialist democracy, we have to demolish those masses of power [i.e. the big companies]. That also makes it critical that we break up giants like Facebook and Google.

But break up the giant companies into what? Smaller and medium-sized capitalist companies? If yes, would the competition among the latter not eventually result in big conglomerates, a tendency that anti-trust or anti-monopoly laws in capitalism can do little about? If no, that is, if the giants are to be replaced by worker-controlled entities, then the question is how can this be achieved in any way other than through the revolutionary seizure of state power by the working class? Marxists do not aim to break up big companies into smaller ones. Capital is primarily not a thing but a social relation expressed as a thing, a relation that cannot be broken into smaller pieces. Marxists’ job is to promote, and to defend, the idea of breaking up – smashing – the rule of capital as such sustained the state power through its various coercieve, ideological and concession-giving apparatusses.

The Democratic Party is the party of Wall Street and has been ever since it lost its base in the unions in the 1980s. Up till now we’ve had one party – the party of Wall Street – with Democratic and Republican wings.

I entirely agree with Harvey. But the question is: does Harvey believe that the working class needs a party of its own? And if yes, what should be the nature of such a party and how is it to be built? Would it be a party of the whole class (of working people with various levels of class consciousness and even with no class consciousness) or a party of class-conscious workers only? How does his Marxism contribute towards the formation of such a party? Does Harvey agree with Marx that: ‘against this collective power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes’ (Marx, 1871).

Does Harvey agree with Marx’s most important follower, Lenin?:

In its struggle for power the proletariat has no other weapon but organisation. Disunited by the rule of anarchic competition in the bourgeois world, ground down by forced labour for capital, constantly thrust back to the ‘lower depths’ of utter destitution, savagery, and degeneration, the proletariat can, and inevitably will, become an invincible force only through its ideological unification on the principles of Marxism being reinforced by the material unity of organisation, which welds millions of toilers into an army of the working class. (Lenin, 1904; italics added)

Does Harvey agree with Lenin’s co-architect of the 1917 revolution and Lenin’s greatest follower, Leon Trotsky (1924), that: ‘Without a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer’?

Critical support for (the Left-wing of) the Democratic party or some such thing is not going to help. What is necessary is a Marxist working-class party that is independent of all fractions of the bourgeoisie. But that strategy implies revolutionary Marxism. But Harvey has little to do with this Marxism (as we will see).

[M]unicipalism can be part and parcel of an overall socialist project . . . it’s up to people like me to organize academics to build a think tank to say what could be tried.

. . . what interests me and some of my colleagues is: if a left-wing local government comes to power, is there a body of work and thinking on the Left that would be helpful to it?

Local governments’ powers are circumscribed . . . There, I would like to see much more power devolved from central government to the municipalities . . .

All this after Bengal communists (who are effectively social democrats) killed peasants to give their land to the big business in India? All this after Syriza, and all that? The Marxist Left has to be a part of the capitalist state to promote the socialist project? Some kind of socialism in one locality?! One wonders: what is the social distance between this view (including ‘socialistic municipalism’) and Lenin’s/Marx’s point about the need to smash the capitalist state, because the working class cannot use it for its own purpose (Das, 2022a).

The local scale is important from the Marxist standpoint. The working class must demand resources in the hands of the local state as a part of its political struggle. But it is a different agenda – a reformist one – to call for the working class to be a part of the local state in the name of municipal socialism and so on. Devolution of power is not necessarily a bad thing. But this must be a political demand of the masses, organized by a communist party or a federation of communist parties, as a part of the fight for taking control over the capitalist state and replacing it with a proletarian-controlled state. The aim of socialists is not to help reproduce a better-functioning, geographically decentralized, capitalist state. Consider Marx’s point in German ideology:

the proletarians . . . will have to abolish the very condition of their existence . . . . Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State. In order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State. (Marx and Engels, 1845)

If the proletariat is opposed to the state, it must be opposed to the local branches of the state. It is the state that expresses and exercises the dictatorship of the capitalist class. This must be replaced by the dictatorship (or, political hegemony) of the proletariat which is the democratic rule by the proletarians allied with petty producers, at all geographical scales, a political hegemony, the aim of which to eventually abolish class society.

The Meaning of Marxism

Marx said our job is not to understand the world but to change it. But I don’t think his practice suggests he wasn’t interested in understanding and explaining the world . . . . [There is a need] to recuperate Marx’s understanding in a manner appropriate to current circumstances, so people get a better idea of what they’re fighting against.

I agree with Harvey about the importance of understanding the world and of renewing it where necessary. ²¹ But he is mistaken on at least two grounds here.

First, Marx would never mean to say, ‘our job is not to understand the world but to change it (italics added)’. If Marx said what Harvey thinks he did, then why would Marx (1866) say that: ‘what I am doing through this work [his theoretical work for Capital] is far more important for the working class than anything I might be able to do personally [e.g. politically, at a working class gathering]’. Also, why would Marx say: Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, on which he spent decades, ‘is without question the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie (landowners included)’ (Marx, 1867).

There is a close connection between theory and practice (Das, 2022c). To change the world one must understand it, and one must understand the world from the standpoint of changing the world (such a standpoint is called a program as a key of ideas about what is to be done to change the world). To understand the world critically and adequately, one needs a specific theoretical vantage-point. That is the Marxist vantage-point, and not one that is located between Marxism on the one hand and anarchism, liberalism, etc. on the other. For Marx (1843), when ideas are critical of the world and help us grasp the problems at their root and when ideas reach the masses, then ideas can serve as a material force just like the organization of the masses can.

Second, one needs the Marxist approach to understand the world; one also needs Marxism for the renewal of our concrete understanding of the world ‘after’ Marx, that is, to ‘recuperate Marx’s understanding’. One must ask: what has changed since Marx wrote, and what has not. One needs Marxist theory to make that crucial distinction. Those who are inclined towards reformism are in the habit of saying that so many things – including the character of the working class – have changed that Marx’s relevance is effectively limited. And, those who are dogmatic and fundamentalists conduct their intellectual and political life as if nothing whatsoever has changed since Marx, so there is no need to acknowledge significant changes at a concrete level. ²²

Here it is crucial to think about Ollman’s (2003) concept of abstraction (which Harvey uses only selectively): there are different ways in which the messy multi-sided reality can be sliced into separate but connected aspects which are then brought together dialectically. For example, there are things that are more universal (the realm of structural social relations and attendant mechanisms), and there are things that are more particular or concrete – the actual ways in which these mechanisms work, ²³ and through which the universal is concretely manifested in specific times and in specific places. It is these latter aspects that change, which might require a change in political tactics on the part of socialists.

[I]t seems this interest [i.e. the interest in Marxism] has faded a bit, since most people are obsessed with trying to explain phenomena like Donald Trump and the turn to fascist-type stuff.

Harvey appears to under-estimate the seriousness of the fascist threat and/or (indirectly) assumes that understanding fascism – ‘fascist-type stuff’ – does not require Marxist thought. Coming from a Marxist, either of these assumptions would be strange, to say the least. Marxism explains not only economic phenomena but also cultural and political phenomena. Capitalism creates conditions for fascism, which is knocking on the door: fascism is basically a response to the capitalist crisis, including the crisis – systemic failure – of capitalist reforms and of reform-oriented organizations, and capitalism creates the foot-soldiers of fascism (e.g. lumpen proletarians and petty bourgeoisie). As the most powerful explanatory framework for understanding the world, Marxism is indispensable to the understanding of fascism (Banaji, 2016; Das, 2018, 2020a chapters 11–13; Trotsky, 1944; Zetkin, 1923). One of the finest proponents of classical Marxism that was begun by Marx/Engels and developed by Lenin, Trotsky advanced the Marxist theory of fascism like no other within that tradition or outside (see Das, 2020a: chapter 11; Deacon, 2020; Trotsky, 1944). Trotsky (1940) said,

Most of the philistines of the newest crop base their attacks on Marxism on the fact that contrary to Marx’s prognosis fascism came instead of socialism. Nothing is more stupid and vulgar than this criticism. Marx demonstrated and proved that when capitalism reaches a certain level the only way out for society lies in the socialization of the means of production, i.e., socialism. . . . Fascism did not at all come ‘instead’ of socialism. Fascism is the continuation of capitalism, an attempt to perpetuate its existence by means of the most bestial and monstrous measures.

For Harvey, the threat of what he calls ‘fascist-type stuff’, including from the Trump phenomenon, may not be a very serious one, but for the masses of the world, it is. For Harvey, the study of fascism or fascistic threat may not be an urgent agenda, but for all revolutionary Marxists, it is, because the biggest target of fascists or fascistic groups are the ideas, organizations and leaders of the working class as well as revolutionary Marxists. ²⁴ However, the working class has no special political significance in Harvey’s thinking. ²⁵ There is something dead wrong about a Marxism for which the working class has no special significance.

‘Alright, if I’m a Marxist, I’m a Marxist, though I don’t know what it means’ – and I still don’t know what it means. It clearly does have a political message, though, as a critique of capital.

Not knowing what being a Marxist means will get one no-where both in terms of understanding the world and politically changing it. Marxism represents the highest form of class consciousness. There is nothing Marxist about not knowing – not being conscious of – what Marxism precisely is. ²⁶

When someone says ‘You are a Marxist, and I am a Marxist too, and my friends Jerry and Mary are Marxists, and we are all Marxists, of different types’, the person forgets a crucial fact: there has to be something called Marxism in the first place for there to be different types of Marxism to which people (apparently) subscribe (e.g. Harvey’s Marxism, Jerry’s Marxism, Mary’s Marxism, my Marxism, etc.). When some people say that ‘I am a Marxist because I believe I am’, this is, in a sense, Marxist post-structuralism/idealism working behind the scenes. The objective effect of saying that ‘I am a Marxist but I do not know what it means’, irrespective of the subjective intention, is to potentially keep open the space for a maximum amount of theoretical flexibility. Such theoretical flexibility would make way for practical collaboration (popular frontism) with relatively ‘progressive’ bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces and would allow one to give up on one’s principles at the most critical points, when firm decisions must be made about one’s loyalty to the cause of proletarian socialism.

Harvey rightly thinks that Marxism is political, that it has a political message. He is wrong to suggest that the political nature of Marxism is confined to a mere critique of capital. There are two points here. First, aspects of capitalism or even of capitalism as a whole can be critiqued from a wide variety of standpoints, including not only from the standpoints of whom Marx and Engels called feudal socialists, petty-bourgeois socialists and bourgeois socialists (Marx and Engels, 1845: 28–34, 52–53), but also from the standpoint of modern-day progressive liberals such as Joseph Stiglitz as well as sections of the populist-fascistic movement. ²⁷ Marx’s is not just any criticism of capitalism. His is a criticism of capitalism from the standpoint of revolutionary proletarian world-socialism. Abolishes wage-slavery and begins to democratize all spheres of society, including the realm of production and exchange, and which begins to replace the spectre of predatory wars with international cooperation among various nationalities, and so on.

Second, criticism is not enough. Merely critiquing this or that aspect of capitalism (including its uneven development or the capitalistic character of urbanization) or this or that capitalist party or leader, or this or that excess or irrationality of capitalism, while all this is useful, does no good ultimately. It can serve as a saftey-valve for reform-oriented criticisms which ultimately stabilize the system. To paraphrase Marx (1843) the weapon of Marxist ideas that are critical of the system cannot replace the ‘criticism of the weapon’ that masses must possess – after all, the ‘material force’ of the capitalist production and exchange along with the capitalist state must be overthrown by the material force of the political power of class-conscious organized masses. If Harvey is not sure about what his Marxism means, then it is not surprising that his views of socialism and socialist democracy are also unclear.

It is interesting that Harvey’s interview does not comment on popular views of socialism where, to quote Harvey, ‘socialism is about abolishing student debt and getting free health care’. It is even more interesting that Harvey’s interview does not even utter a word about socialist revolution. ²⁸ He does not because his intellectual ideas do not lead him to subscribe to the Marxist theory that capitalism must be overthrown for humanity’s fundamental problems to be genuinely and durably addressed.

Conclusion

Harvey does recognize, however, inadequately, that there are classes and that people should engage in (class) struggles. But that is not enough to be a Marxist. Nor is a Marxism which is seen merely ‘as a critique of capital’ enough. Capital is critiqued from all sorts of class-standpoints, which is why Marx talked about many forms of socialism, including bourgeois socialism and petty-bourgeois socialism and so on. Harvey is right that a critique of capital is political, but there is political and there is political. ²⁹ Let me state Marx’s politics in his own words. Marx did not ‘claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them’. His own contributions included merely the claim that ‘the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat’ and that ‘that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society’ (Marx, 1852, letter to Weydemeyer). ³⁰

Does David Harvey agree with Marx? I doubt it.

Marxist theory is a theory of the problems of the world and how to get rid of these problems through revolutionary struggle by the working masses. To change the world one must understand it, which is why Lenin (1902: 12) famously said, ‘Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement’. Lenin could have also said: with academic theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This statement would be relevant to Harvey’s ideas.

Harvey’s Marxism offers many insights. But overall, much of his thinking is simply inadequate from the standpoint of a radical multi-sided understanding of the world and from the standpoint of the radical transformation of the current world into world socialism. Here is a view of Marxism that Harvey (and his academic/activist followers) might consider. Marxism is a set of ideas that ‘directly serves to enlighten and organise the advanced class in modern society, indicates the tasks facing this class and demonstrates the inevitable replacement . . . of the present system by a new order’ (Lenin, 1908). The explanatory part of the Marxist worldview, which is much more powerful than any other way of thinking about society and its relation with nature, makes the following claims (Das, 2020b, 2020c):

1. an adequate understanding of society and its metabolic relation with nature requires a commitment to materialist-dialectical thinking;

2. humanity’s problems – ecological crisis, immiseration, uneven geographical development, economic inequality, recurrent economic crises, imperialist war, cultural degradation, corporate control over education, student debt, racism, attacks on democratic rights, and so on – are rooted in relations of class power and, especially, capitalism, including its accumulation processes, and cause tendency towards class struggle;

3. the actual functioning of class exploitation and capitalism shapes, and is shaped by, social relations of oppression such as those based on gender, race, caste, religion, language, sexual orientation, indigeneity, and nationality, all of which enormously impact human lives within the overall framework of the existing class society;

4. the problems that capitalist class relations create cannot be resolved durably and significantly by the capitalist state or any other agency inside capitalism; and

5. the resolution of humanity’s problems requires a revolutionary socialist movement led by the working class allied with petty producers, and the establishment of a socialist society globally.

There aren’t many people who have spent as much time on Marx as David Harvey has. I love Harvey’s unceasing love for Marx. He was a reason why I turned to Marxism myself 30 years ago. I admire his 50-year-long effort to popularize Marx’s ideas. Harvey is a crucial cultural resource of our time. He has had much to offer. However, many of his current ideas are extremely inadequate both from a theoretical and from a practical standpoint.