The following is an edited extract from The Story of Capital: What Everyone Should Know About How Capital Works by David Harvey, published by Verso Books today, February 24.
Karl Marx set his theoretical investigations of capital’s mode of production and its laws of motion in the context of British industrial capitalism between the 1840s and the 1860s. He initially did so in the belief that “the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.” Whether or not such a belief was justified is, of course, an open question.
Toward the end of his life, after intensive anthropological investigations and detailed consideration of the Russian case in particular, Marx himself began to doubt this proposition, thus preparing the way for a subsequent critique of what many view as his Eurocentrism. But what is not open to question is the depth and range of Marx’s knowledge of the state of industrial capital in mid-nineteenth-century Britain.
In this, Marx was fortunate to find a huge archive of investigative materials assembled by the British state-appointed factory inspectors, public health officials and parliamentary inquiries on everything from child labor to banking practices. He fulsomely acknowledged the importance of these materials for his own interpretations and complained at the “wretched state” of information from elsewhere:
We should be appalled at or own circumstances if, as in England, our government and parliaments periodically appointed commissions of inquiry into economic conditions; if these commissions were armed with the same plenary powers to get at the truth; if it were possible to find for this purpose as competent, as free of partisanship and respect of persons, as are England’s factory inspectors, her medical reporters on public health, her commissioners of inquiry into the exploitation of women and children, into conditions of housing and nourishment, and so on.
The English…
Auteur: David Harvey
