Dialectics and Class in Marxian Economics: David Harvey and Beyond
by NSER Editorial Board on January 12, 2009
The clash of different Marxian theories infusing David Harvey’s work reflects a key transitional moment in the development of the Marxian tradition1. He draws deeply from the rich accumulated literature of that tradition’s 150 years. At the same time, the new directions within Marxism that erupted in the 1960s and 1970s profoundly influenced Harvey. Transition within Marxism, itself the product of social changes, shaped certain transitional qualities of Harvey’s work.
In the hundred years after Marx’s death in 1883, Marxism spread rapidly. One or more of its tendencies or interpretations eventually entered the life of every country. Everywhere, among intellectuals, academics, periodicals, newspapers, trade unions, and political
parties, Marxism found adherents who expanded the tradition by contributing perspectives emerging from their varied social circumstances. Even some governments did so. Not surprisingly, such global growth and dissemination provoked intense and
often theoretically creative debates over every aspect of Marx’s legacy. On the one hand, such growth helped the Bolsheviks to organize and to take power in 1917. However, in dialectical fashion, the Bolshevik victory also led to a sharp constriction of those debates
once Stalin took over and solidified the global status of one Marxist tendency as “classical Marxism.” When the Soviet preeminence in defining Marxism began to crumble in the 1960s, formerly marginalized (and often suppressed) Marxist viewpoints re-emerged and new kinds of Marxism arose. They often criticized “classical Marxism” and reignited new debates over the present and future of Marxism. David Harvey’s work reflects and embodies a transitional period within the Marxist tradition.
Harvey reformulates classical Marxism – especially its basic economics – in the light of the issues (including the state, economic crisis, and imperialism) of central concern to social theory and political struggles in the 1960s and 1970s. His 1982 The Limits to Capital does this while also integrating a Marxist geographer’s interest in space and the spatial dimensions of capitalism. Yet already in that book, Harvey recognized that the 1960s and 1970s had also grounded basic issues of epistemology and ontology as central to every social theory, and he explicitly included Marxism (xv). He chose then – in the interests of what he termed “simplicity of exposition” – to ignore the emergence of a critical postmodernism within the modernism that Marxism shared with most other social theories. However, he soon realized that his reformulated Marxism had to come to terms with the postmodern critical perspectives that were sweeping across virtually all disciplines. He undertook that task in his 1990 book The Condition of Postmodernity. In both books, Harvey contributed significantly to Marxism’s intense period of transition as much as his work drew inspiration from it.
Resnick, Stephen and Richard Wolff. 2004. “Dialectics and Class in Marxian Economics: David Harvey and Beyond.” New School Economic Review 1(1): 59-72
