Teaching Marx for the Conjuncture

David Harvey opens his chapter on ‘The Geopolitics of Capitalism’ in The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles with the proviso that ‘coming from a geographical background, I feel I always have to insert some geography into the analysis somehow and somewhere.’ What might be read as a perfunctory disciplinary obligation belies the significance of his intellectual contribution. His work is a key reason why these relations between geography and the geopolitics of capital are now considered as fundamental problematics to address and as having important political implications.

Originating in bi-monthly podcasts given by Harvey, The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles was published in 2020 in Pluto Press’s Red Letter series which seeks to create ‘resources for popular education in working-class and socialist moments.’ This style of intervention reflects Harvey’s exemplary role as a teacher and interlocutor of Marx's ideas and his long-standing commitment to political engagement and left pedagogy. Throughout the book Harvey provides some insightful comments on the different political conjunctures in which he has read and taught Marx and sought to put his ideas to work. These reflections provide some useful openings to consider what is at stake in terms of teaching Marx in different conjunctures which I discuss here.

Harvey recalls that he first taught his now famous course on Marx’s Capital in 1970 when he was newly arrived at John Hopkins University in Baltimore. The influence of the city and its social dynamics on his thinking emerge in the chapter on ‘Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Climate Change’ where he recalls experiencing the disconnect between the whiteness of early environmental movements and the city’s African American population. Noting that after attending an Earth Day event in Baltimore in 1970, where there was ‘entirely a white middle-class audience in attendance’, he went to the Baltimore Jazz club with ‘just a smattering of white folks’. The musicians performing there declaimed to ‘great cheers from the audience’ that “our biggest environmental problem is Richard Nixon.’

This story locates Harvey’s initial teaching of Marx in relation to the post- 1968 context in which radical geography (re)emerged and took shape. The radical journal of geography Antipode to which Harvey would be an early contributor and supporter, for example, was founded in 1969 at Clark University.  It was also a context where a serious and non-doctrinaire engagement with Marx’s ideas was becoming more significant. This was notable given the repressive intellectual context of the Cold War exerted considerable pressure and limits on both teaching Marx and on Marxist scholarship and intellectuals.

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Thus the socialist historian E.P. Thompson was ‘nearly a victim of the onset of the Cold War in academia’, obtained a post with the Workers Educational Association (WEA) just  before a ban on Communists was enforced in the late 1940s.[1] Thompson defended the importance of teaching from a Marxist perspective to his superiors at the organisation arguing that ‘Marxists were so often accused of having axes to grind when in practice many of them were “far more tentative and less prejudiced in their approach”’ than many liberal or Conservative historians.[2]

Thompson’s classic history from below, The Making of the English Working Class, was decisively shaped by this adult education work, which took place in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Among other contributions Thompson documents the states’ extensive use of spies to monitor early working-class movements and struggles in England. While working on the book Thompson was himself the subject of intense surveillance as the files kept on his political activities by Britain’s secret police, known in polite circles as MI5 document. This surveillance was to continue after he had left the Communist Party in the wake of the invasion of Hungary by the USSR in1956.

The files record his interactions with anti-colonial figures such as Cheddi Jagan the leader of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) in Guyana who visited Thompson in Halifax in the late 1950s. This was after the British government had deposed the democratically elected PPP government in 1953 after it had introduced modest left reforms. Thompson tried unsuccessfully to persuade Jagan to write for the New Reasoner, the part precursor of New Left Review he co-edited with John Saville. These links emphasise the relations between decolonisation, struggles over higher education and the concerted repression of left ideas in this context.

As Aijaz Ahmad observed in the 2004 Socialist Register during the Cold War the US ‘systematically set out to bring key intellectual strata from the newly decolonized countries into its own academic institutions, across the diverse fields of physical and technical sciences, social sciences and the humanities, arts, diplomacy, jurisprudence and so on[3]’  This process was, however, contested in important ways. Thus writing of the inception of Ethnic Studies/ Black Studies in the US in 1967-1968 Robin D.G. Kelley asserts that ‘this political and intellectual project was conceived not just outside the university but in opposition to a university culture with deep ties to corporate and military power.’[4]  

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A key reference point marking the authoritarian roots of neoliberalism in The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles is the deposing of the Popular Unity government in Chile. In a discussion of the ‘economist Paulo Guedes’, Jair Bolsonaro’s financial adviser, Harvey draws attention to the fact that he was ‘trained in Chicago.’ He draws a historical parallel here noting that ‘it was Chicago that provided the Chicago Boys to General Pinochet in the wake of the coup in 1973 in Chile in which the socialist president Salvador Allende was ousted and the economy was reimagined in terms of Chicago economic theory.’

The coup also involved significant repression of the vibrant left intellectual cultures shaped during the Popular Unity period. Marian E Schlotterbeck notes, for example, that between 1968 and 1973 the Sociology Department at the University of Concepción, became ‘an internationally renowned centre for Marxist thought and dependency theory.’[5] The intellectual culture was shaped by both Chilean intellectuals and exiles from Brazil and Argentina and would influence the politics of left parties such as the MIR.

There are parallels here with current attempts to close down spaces for political dissent on university campuses- such as the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil for his role in organising pro-Palestine solidarity protests at Columbia University. This repression of left political cultures is being shaped by the alliance between ‘neoliberal economics’ and ‘right wing populism’ identified by Harvey in his chapter on the authoritarian turn- which has only become more entrenched since the publication of The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles.

Harvey closes the chapter on ‘The Geopolitics of Capitalism’ by arguing that ‘the geopolitics of the spatial fix has to be a focus of serious study’. In the current context the space of the university itself has become central to struggles over the relations between geopolitics and accumulation strategies. The report Weaponising Universities published in 2024 by Campaign Against the Arms Trade draw attention to the increasing importance the ‘Military-Industrial-Academic Complex’ in UK Higher Education. While noting that such linkages are not necessarily new the report’s author Okopi Ajonye argues that  ‘privatisation and the funding crisis of universities have collectively stimulated the arms industry to subcontract R&D to universities.’[6]  

The ties of the ‘Military-Industrial-Academic Complex’ to arms companies with links to what the International Criminal Court has defined as a genocide in Gaza are now well documented. The complete erasure of universities in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces is buttressed and enabled by anti-democratic repression elsewhere reflecting the ways in which ‘parties from the far right through to traditional social democrats’ have rushed ‘to close ranks behind the Israeli state.’ [7]As Adam Hanieh, Robert Knox and Rafeef Ziadah argue ‘Globally, this has involved the repression of protest movements, the criminalisation of activism and a crackdown on pro-Palestine speech in universities and public spaces.’[8] 

This repressive political conjuncture is fraught for left scholarship. It also emphasises the urgent necessity of reproducing Marxist and other critical scholarship informed by an anti-imperial sensibility. While Harvey’s work does not provide a blue print for such work it provides a formidable example of engaged intellectual work and rigorous scholarship. It also emphasises the possibilities of teaching Marx as a politically generative process.

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