 A Critical Analysis of Capitalism, Capital Accumulation and Crisis Theory in David HarveyTanaya Majumder Arthaniti: Journal of Economic Theory and Practice, 2022, vol. 21, issue 2, 215-235 Abstract: This article is a critical review of David Harvey’s essentialist theorisation of a capitalist economy and its crisis from a class focused Marxist perspective. The first part examines Harvey’s immense contribution to the understanding of space and spatiality of capitalism within the Marxist tradition. Capital accumulation in his theorisation serves as the impresario of space and spatiality and the harbinger of capitalist crisis in general. Expanding on a class focused approach, the second part provides a critique of Harvey’s methodology and crisis theory in which the law of capital accumulation reigns supreme. Specifically, using an anti-essentialist methodology of overdetermination with class process of surplus labour as the theoretical entry point, as developed by Resnick and Wolff, I argue that no correspondence of the rate of capital accumulation with those of rate of profit and rate of class distribution can be drawn. This unpredictability renders capitalism inherently unstable, prone to business cycles whose cause cannot be reduced to any chosen causal factor such as the one reducible to capital accumulation. JEL Codes: P12, P16 Keywords: Capitalism; capital accumulation; class; crisis of capitalism; overdetermination (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:artjou:v:21:y:2022:i:2:p:215-235 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Arthaniti: Journal of Economic Theory and Practice |
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