The Story of Capital makes a major contribution to Marxist theory and critical communication studies. Harvey offers a synthetic, lucid, and expansive account of capital’s totality. The book’s strengths are evident from its conceptual architecture. Harvey integrates production, circulation, realisation, technology, finance, fixed capital, social reproduction, extractivism, the rentier, and the state-finance nexus within one moving field. Apple, Google, Amazon, Musk, Silicon Valley, AI, Blackstone, central banks, higher education, and military research all appear inside the same theoretical horizon. That concreteness greatly enhances the book’s usefulness for communication scholars.
The book’s second major strength lies in its treatment of the state. Harvey integrates the economy and the state within a single moving field. Harvey shows how state functions inhabit the inner structure of accumulation and how financial governance, public debt, infrastructural investment, military competition, and territorial control enter capital’s very operation. This framework is especially valuable for media and digital analysis because communication infrastructures often sit at the intersection of state policy, military investment, research funding, and corporate platform expansion.
The third major strength lies in Harvey’s historical sensibility. Harvey consistently treats capital as geographically uneven, historically specific, and internally contradictory. This sensibility allows the book to move from Manchester to Shenzhen, from Venice to Silicon Valley, from the factory to the airport, from the university to the central bank. The communication analysis gains force because it appears inside this broader historical map.
Read the full review by John Bessai in Communication, Capitalism & Critique.
