[d157opia] Male, 22. Torino, Italy

As the author -a well known marxist (or marxian, i leave up to him those nominalistic issues) economist- says, the book aims to annoy and provoke the dear old faithful marxist-leninist reader and his traditional creeds, which today also affect the public imaginary of Marx : the a priori pejorative bias towards capitalism, refusing to aknowledge its progressive nature; an often similarly unilateral trust in social constructivism against self-organized dynamics; an overall tendency to avoid clear and direct confrontation with many cogent issues posed by modern liberal/libertarian thinkers like Hayek.

The list could easily go on, it's all in the book. The real mess is what lacks: the proportion between the critique and the pars construens is indeed much more annoying than the critique in itself, which is welcomed as far as i'm concerned. With the admiring intent to recover an image of Marx consistent with his classical thought rather than with the many subsequent vulgarizations, Desai ends up to be so good in neutraliazing all "absolute" antagonisms (with almost no distiction made) through the dialectical internalization of "creative destruction", that he cannot possibly finish his book without assuming a very smoky, almost unpolitical, both nihilist and messianic position.

This is all good in a flat, theoretical word in which creative destruction is always there, always the same, everywhere, at the same pace, a sort of hegelian dialectical process in fact. But reality, as the young Marx knew, is different. So what about having the destructive moment being dominant in a place, to fuel the creation elsewhere? What about partial fixities, temporary configurations, uneveness, in a word, geography in all its historical manifestations? Desai doesn't face the real question. He always only mentions it as an element of his theoretical discourse.

Thus he can agree with Shumpeter on the supposed "atavic nature of imperialism" at the very moment in which geopolitical rivalries and capitalism are intertwining themselves like no other time in history in many regions of the globe.

The problem is that Desai still conceives imperialism as a building-block to be rejected. But the problem is precisely that, as capitalism is neither a static "leninist" imbalance nor an armonic "hegelian" development, imperialism has never been about eternal building-blocks. And so sentencing its death in favour of a purely cooperative global capitalistic order is equally wrong -as the neoconservative wars and the growing geopolitical competitiveness in Asia prove- than the leninist views of Paul Baran or Andre Gunder Frank. Imperialism is a set of tendencies with both cyclical and evolutionary elements which -being consisent with capitalism and its long term fexibility- will survive, and not fall into the "dustbin of history".

This is just one example of how Desai is plainly throwing the Marx/baby out with the bath water. In the book there are plenty of comments flawed by this attitude to idealize historical progress as a pure entity to be used as a weapon to crush the "fixities" of marxist orthodoxy. Bad way to do it, i say. "External" critique never fully accomplishes its tasks.

To say nothing of the snobbish impression that the book should give to a more pragmatic reader, maybe interested into human rights and social justice politics rather than in philosophical speculation. Indeed, it would seem to him that all a Desai-approved marxist can do is to sit down and sympathetically observe capitalism revolutionizing the world and taking notes of it. Hardly less elitarian than Desai's view of keynesian technocracy.

Sometimes Desai seems aware of the dangers of pushing too far his argument and then he adds some counter-balancing comment, thus revealing the imcompleteness of his critique. So, keynesianism was an illusion and Marx woulde have hated it, but -Desai at the end recognized- it nonetheless provided the best growth rates ever in the history of capitalism. Then, markets are "superior" to command and control, but in the end they are interrelated rather than diametrically opposed and Desai has to admit it when speaking about East Asian tigers.

But then? Has the book effectively accomplished something new at the theoretical level? In my opinion, the answer is no: it accompanies the reader on a big turnaround, exposing him to a vast and salutary array of emphases, metaphors and stylistic strategies to convince him to abandon distorted images of Marx. But this happens without replacing it with a complete, new, more balanced image.

A more balanced image would have required, indeed, a more balanced critique. And a more balanced critique would have probably been more consistent with a concrete economic and political analysis, inherently displacing the old ones and so effectively vindicating Marx, rather than the sarcastic british intellectual biography format.

Harvey here systematizes his recent ideas about an "open" dialectical method founded on footnote four of chapter 15 of Marx's Capital, explaining Marx's own definition of technology in terms of different "moments": technology itself, relations to nature, social relations, mental conceptions, production processes and frames of daily life. You can find that sort of argumet in his speach at Marxism festival 2009 here --> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYQb0fthNfI

All this takes place in an overall discourse on geographical theory, aimed at critically engaging cosmopolitan authors like Martha Nussbaum, David Held, Ulrich Beck and others in order to redefine their discourse in a much more geographically pertinent way.

All good, although there isn't much novelty about his arguments on space, place, environment and relational thinking. Indeed, all that sounds a bit like repeating what he has already extensively written about on Justice, Nature and the geography of difference.

It would have been better if Harvey had focused more on the cosmopolitan and legal tradition -all the federalist thinking, for example, passes unseen- and on issues of traditional political science, as the part on state and individual is indeed a poor one, confirming again the sad complaint, made many years ago by italian political philosopher Norberto Bobbio, that marxists lacks of a satisfying theory of the state.

Than, the relational bias, if so much negativity is continuely cast on absolute spaces in an all too common foucauldian way, sometimes risks to give birth to excessive speculations and lack of historical grounding.

The overall argument, nonetheless, is a strong one: cosmopolitan idealism has to be reversed, and his legs put firmly on the ground. This inevitably requires facing the contradictions of mainstream conceptions of space and superimposing them with a new, radical geography of freedom.

Stagnationist cheerleaders John Bellamy Foster and Magdoff Jr. recover a Sweezy-esque vocabulary to fashion a seriously undialectical explanation of today's economic crisis.

Despite several years of credit-led booms not only within Wall Street but everywhere around the capitalist world, expecially in South Asia, despite stunning technological and organizational innovations in production processes and transports, despite all kinds of outsourcing, restructuring of value chains, of international and national institutions and of geopolitical relations, and despite drastic social and cultural changes -the ongoing proletarianization of about a billion people in Asia to say one, in Foster and Magdoff minds the gloomy shadow of monopoly capitalism still looms large.

Despite the frequent warn not to consider manufacturing and monetary sides of economy -the so called real and financial sides- as separated (with many quotation marks used to still refer to the "real" when the intellectual job is done), here all rules the contrary. The only relational argument made is -indeed- only one. And so pretty much one-sided. Financial wealth -in the authors' view- is the backside of stagnation. In other words, finance depends on and is completely trackable back to the dear old real economy. That linear dependence does not fit well with the fact that "financial monopoly capital" -as they call it- has lived so long. Has it produced poverty and turbulences? Of course. This, sadly, does not mean it didn't succeeded.

One has hardly to be a Wall Street's broker to experience last decades of "non-real economy" capital accumulation as incredibly real. Go explain to foreclosed people that those security-backed mortgages were in fact "unreal" because not derived from fordist manufacture.

Instead of blindly relying on an author who himself recognized that "There is one glearing discrepancy [between the theory and actual historical development] which is not even hinted at, le alone explained, in Monopoly Capitalism (...) the burgeoning (...) of a vastly expanded and increasingly complex financial sector" and that accumulation is not only "a matter of adding the stock on existing capital goods" but also "a matter of adding to the stock of financial assets" so that assuming "buying stocks and bonds (...) to be merely an indirect way of buying real capital goods (...) is hardly ever true, and it can be totally misleading", Foster and Magdoff should have tried to build that model of finance capitalism to the absence of which they point to, pretty much as a way to justify an incoherent and a-storic use of the stagnation thesis to explain a period characterized by -among other issues- the rise of FDIs and of huge international commerce expansion. Hardly symptoms of lacking investment opportunities.

Pedestrianly juxtaposing the Hansen stagnation argument to a minskyian, merely quantitative account of finance, stigmatized as "speculation" without paying much attention to the way it sustained effective demand (here lies the one-sided character of the argument), prevents the authors to achieve a satisfying account of the originality of the neoliberal era. A period which, although obviously still prone to the laws of capitalism, discloses the latters in very different ways in respect of when Monopoly Capital has been written.

Sustainable -though turbulent- growth in the US, Japan, India, China, South Korea, a large part of Eurozone over the last years cannot be explained without some sort of cycle, even though a degenerative one. Repeating "sooner or later it will crash" untill it finally happens is not an explanation, expecially if you proclame yourself a marxist and so already quite trustful about the necessity of crises in the first instance.

A semi-autonomus model is needed to explain neoliberalism and its crises. The one presented in this book is a barely linear, causative model which conceives finance capital as a residual form of profitability without understanding the productive and spatial shifts that underpins it, thus creating -through crises, indeed- new conditions for profit extraction, of the sort that can easily be seen today in asian internal markets, not to speak about actual chinese invasion of Africa. Instead to see finance capital as a vehicle able to shift the geographies of productive power and related profit margins while transforming the overall spatial scales structure of global accumulation in a creative and regenerative way, the "stagnation hypothesis" evokes a scenario in which crises aren't followed by any recovery, thus seeing them as sorts of armageddons, something which of course never happened and is not going to happen until capital has reached its limits. And those limits are not a matter of rough investment profitability, but of social definition of the latter throug the rate of surplus-value, institutions, and a norm of social consumption, as the regulation school stated.

The reluctancy to give a meaning to the neoliberal phase in itself points directly to the absence of any reference to value theory, despite many rigorous efforts have been made in the last years to embed more solidly finance capital and credit in it (see for example de Brunhoff S., 1973, and more recently Harvey D., 2006).

At the end -as every book on a crisis- of course Foster and Magdoff come to say that "speculation mounts and than capitalism fall into crisis". The conclusion is right, but obvious. The problem is the static, state-centered, poorly post-keynesian way in which it is all explained. And explanation is everything.

Although the pretty much uneasy and sometimes quite hortodox exposition, Neil Smith here delivers a bunch of good insights about Marx's "second nature" and Lefebvre's ideas on the "production of space", with a preliminary -not fully satisfying in my view- critique of Schmidt frankfurt-ish theory on the concept of Nature in Marx.

What I think is most important here, is the idea of scales as interacting, coherent -if historically determined- spatial subsystems, internally fuelled, moving towards a progressive and turbulent expansion.

Another important topic, which is by no means new in Marxian theory but nonetheless absolutely lacking of proper discussion today, is the dialectics between centralization and dispersal.

To be honest, I was expecting more from this one, expecially in terms of explanation and argumentative attitude. While reading, it appears clear that it has been written many years ago, with unnecessary rhetorical style. But in the end the key concepts are well exposed, and usually this takes place in best pages of the book. Than, the afterwords help actualizing a bit the whole discourse.