Seventeen Contradictions is the most dangerous book I have ever written. It is also the latest (and maybe the last) of a series of books that I refer to in retrospect as “the Marx Project”. I say “in retrospect” since I had no idea until recently that such a project had been in the making. A combination of dramatic historical shifts and the logic of what I was doing propelled me onwards from one topic/book to another and yet another.

The project began sometime in the late 1990s but became more explicit after 2000. I had looked forward to that year not because it was the beginning of a new millennium but because I imagined it as the year of my retirement. So here I am fifteen years and a dozen or so books later wondering what happened. In part I blame this on my move to the CUNY Graduate Center in 2001. This proved to be the best career move I ever made. I removed myself from the misery of an increasingly isolated life in an elitist Johns Hopkins to a privileged position in the rough and tumble and politically charged atmosphere of a massive public university with great colleagues (most notably Cindi Katz and Neil Smith as well as good friends in Anthropology) and politically minded graduate students. It was the latter who insisted I do the video series on Marx’s Capital; they also did the skilled work of making the videos and setting up and maintaining the web-site. I owe them, and Chris Caruso in particular, a tremendous debt.

So what was this “Marx Project” all about? It had long been obvious that Marx was not well understood, let alone actively embraced, and that much work was needed to make his work more accessible. This was not only because of general ignorance based in avoidance and right wing distortions but also because of some of the more dogmatic presentations on the part of the sectarian left. Academic Marxism, meanwhile, seemed for the most part hell-bent on making Marx’s thought even more complicated than it already was. I had to some degree contributed to this in writing Limits to Capital (a work which, at the time of its publication – 1982 – was depicted by one reviewer as “another milestone for geography and another mill-stone around graduate students necks”). There clearly was a space in which I could take the experience of teaching Volume One of Marx’s Capital at least once every year after 1971 and put it to good use. In some years in the 1970s I had taught it three or more times both on and off campus (when I taught it in the university I always did so in addition to my contractual teaching load so nobody could claim I was neglecting my academic duties in favor of politics!). I aimed throughout to simplify and clarify Marx’s argument without dumbing it down or resorting to simplicities. I tried not to impose any particular reading of Marx, though it is impossible of course not to base the teaching in one’s own interpretations (mine is just one out of many plausible readings). I wanted to open a door into Marx’s thinking so that readers could pass through it and create their own understandings on the other side. That is the spirit in which the video series and the written Companions to Marx’s Capital Volumes One and Two were also constructed.

I also felt a pressing need to illustrate the contemporary relevance of Marx’s thinking for politics. This carried with it an obligation to identify not only what we might learn from Marx but what he had left incomplete, assumed away or simply (heaven forbid!) gotten wrong. It also entailed recognizing what was outdated in his thinking and what was not. The question that was very much on my mind was: What is it that reading Marx can teach us today and what is it that we have to do for ourselves to understand the world around us? I therefore set out to illustrate the utility of Marx’s method as well as of his concrete theorizations by putting my understanding of them to work in analyzing contemporary events and issues – hence the books on the new imperialism, the brief history of neoliberalism, the spatial dynamics of uneven geographical development, interpretations of the crisis of 2007-8 (The Enigma of Capital), and analyses of capitalist urbanization, a topic I addressed in Spaces of Hope, Rebel Cities and had a wonderful time continuously re-thinking and ruminating upon in the book on Second Empire Paris. The Paris book, an exercise in what I call historical-geographical materialism, filled in the history between Marx’s analysis of how Louis Bonaparte came to power in the wake of the failed revolution of 1848 (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) and what happened in the Paris Commune of 1871 (The Civil War in France). I did not consciously choose to do the Paris study with this in mind (I began to work on the topic back in 1976 because I was interested in Haussmann’s works). Only relatively late in the day did I realize I was bridging the gap between two of Marx’s seminal political works! Continue reading