AS A non-technical explanation of how the processes outlined in Marx’s ‘Capital’ pan out in today’s world, David Harvey’s ‘The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism’ will prove pretty hard to beat.

According to the jacket blurb, Harvey is now the world’s most cited academic geographer. I’m not sure how stiff the competition is – to be frank, I could not so much as name anyone else in the field – but this background gives him a distinctive take that makes reading him a different proposition to ploughing through Mandel/Harman/insert leftist economist hero of choice.

The tone is deliberately reasonable, aimed at convincing non-Marxists that Marxists are not space cadets, and that can only be a good thing.

Harvey’s underlying contention is that capital, as self-expanding value growing by a compound 3% per annum, must always secure new outlet for revalorisation. Crises stem from its periodic inability to achieve that.

Distinguishing his analysis from other Marxist positions – such as profit squeeze, TRPF and underconsumptionist schools – he offers this as the real ‘limit to capital’.

I was particularly taken with Harvey’s periodisation of the crisis, which of course commenced not in 2007 but in 1997-98, with the Asia collapse, the Long Term Capital Management bailout and the Russian default.

I also agreed with his stress on the role of credit in overcoming capitalism’s effective demand problem, a process described by other writers as ‘privatised Keynesianism’.

Less convincing was Harvey’s attempt to stitch together a geography-based seven-part notion he calls ‘co-evolution’ and to pass it off as Marx’s own work. Most of us will need more detail if he truly wants to sell his case.

Sadly, his conclusions – which even he describes as utopian- are astonishingly naive coming from a Marxist of Harvey’s obvious calibre. ‘Class is a role, not a label that attaches to persons. We play multiple roles all the time,’ he writes.

‘Why can’t we all just work alongside each other without any class distinction?’ That seems tantamount to asking why we can’t just all share the love.

A quick footnote on Mike Davis’s ‘Buda’s Wagon: a Brief History of the Car Bomb’. I’d almost say this book was a lot of fun, if that were not singularly inappropriate to the subject matter. It reads like a thriller, but the problem is, it is all true.

Davis – a US-based British Cliffite, I understand – romps through the full 90 years of the vehicle-borne improvised explosive device saga at breakneck pace, and in rapidly read journolese to boot, leaving little time for theorising the whys and wherefores. But who cares about boring stuff like the ethics of blowing kiddies to smithereens?

While he does his best to be neutral, Davis is clearly more sympathetic to some car bombers than others.

But then, all politically engaged readers will be; as the author makes plain, everybody from Al Qa’eda to the CIA to the Stern Gang to white supremacists has had a bash at this deadly tactic.

Definitive on the topic.