A close reading of the text of Karl Marx's Capital in free video lectures by David Harvey. Start here

David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and author of numerous books. He has been teaching Karl Marx's Capital for over 40 years. Read his CV.

First chapter of his 1977 book in pdf

The crisis and the blogosphere have opened mainstream economics up to new attack

I start my meditation with a true story that will serve as a parable. On his 21st birthday, the nature writer Francis Thompson was presented by his father with a bill for all the expenses of his upbringing including the costs of his birth and delivery. Francis paid the bill, but he never spoke to his father again. This story is recounted in David Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, an excellent account of the history of money. Yet Graber titled his book  “debt”; did he just get it wrong, or did he uncover the essential nature of money?

LONDON – Europe is now haunted by the specter of debt. All European leaders quail before it. To exorcise the demon, they are putting their economies through the wringer.

It doesn’t seem to be helping. Their economies are still tumbling, and the debt continues to grow. The credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s has just downgraded the sovereign-debt ratings of nine eurozone countries, including France. The United Kingdom is likely to follow.

detailed and regularly updated blog by the mysterious Lord Keynes. Engaged (sometimes vociferously) in the MMT vs Austrian debate. An excellent resource on the theories of the origin of money.

This is the English language version of the entry on ‘Money’ (‘Geld’) in the ‘Historisch Kritisch
Wörterbuch des Marxismus’, a comprehensive dictionary of Marxist terminology being produced as
an accompaniment to the Marx-Engels-Gesamt-Arbeite (Marx-Engels collected works), a
comprehensive critical edition of the works of Marx and Engels: Historisch Kritisch Wörterbuch
des Marxismus, Band 5: Gegenöffentlichkeit–Hegemonialapparat. Hamburg: Argument-Verlag,
ISBN 3-88619-435-

David Graeber and Robert Murphy have been debating the validity of the monetary regression theory.  They seem to be talking past one another.  Graeber is assuming that Austrian theory agrees with neo-classical theory in areas where it does not, and Murphy is assuming that Graeber is substantially more familiar with Austrian ideas than he seems to be.  To clear up the confusion, we need to take a step back and start at the beginning.


Like all theoretical sciences, economics is concerned with the identification of invariants.  Austrian theory and the more mainstream neo-classical theory agree on this much, but strongly disagree on methodology.

Have you ever realized the amazing amount of labour wasted every day in colleges and universities around the world? Tons of papers, exams, reading notes, etc. are written every year only to be forgotten in a computer file, land in the bin or being thrown into a fire to cook some sausages once summer comes. If every generation of students could build on their predecessors’ work they’d go further and faster and they’d create something lasting beyond the last exam.
I for one read tens of papers every month, this blog is thus mostly designed to pass on the knowledge I managed to gather from these readings. This sort of open source, qualitative, internet-based source (hack-ademia if you wish) is destined to overcome the five obstacles preventing one from accessing information: distance, time, money, language and the lack of direction.

Amid the blizzard of economic data that the government puts out every week, last Tuesday’s report analyzing G.D.P. industry by industry got little notice. But it contained one very interesting piece of data: in 2008, for the first time in sixteen years, the finance and insurance industry shrank. Since 1980, this sector’s share of the economy has grown by almost half. Now, apparently, the worm has turned.