Summer Study Projects: Marx's Capital and David Harvey's Limits To Capital

Recently I became aware of the online course Reading Capital with David Harvey, a radical geographer and Marxist theoretician. The course lectures are delivered through either mp3 audio or various video formats. I downloaded the first two course sections and listened to them on a long drive to a temporary work detail location. After doing so I decided that I wanted to make another attempt at reading and understanding Karl Marx's classic "Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production", that is with David Harvey's assistance. Its tough book to read alone without some direction. There is also an online forum for the course, so one can even hopefully engage in discussion with others reading the text.

In I think the second lecture Harvey mentions that many people give up the attempt at a serious reading of Capital in the very tough third chapter. Come to think of it, thats about where I put it down about four years ago!

I also just ordered and received David Harvey's book Limits to Capital which is a book that attempts to put the theoretical ideas of Marx's Capital in today's historical context. Although I haven't seriously started reading the book, while scanning the pages to the 2006 edition I came upon an interesting factoid.

After Mexico began its program of neoliberal economic restructuring and privatization in 1988, twenty four Mexican billionaires appeared on Forbes' 1994 list of the world's wealthiest. Then of course the North American Free Trade Agreement was passed in the early 1990s. By 2005 Mexico had more billionaires than Saudi Arabia. NAFTA had the effect of massively restructuring the agricultural sector of Mexico's economy, turning small farming campesinos into wage workers. While some of this population was absorbed into the border zone "maquiladora" factories, many of these still could not compete with lower wage labor in China. Ultimately many of these people migrated to the United State to become cheap labor and treated as second class "illegal immigrants". This is one example of the process that Harvey calls "accumulation by dispossession". In the video below Harvey talks further about "accumulation by dispossession" in lecture 12 of the online course.