Over the last forty years, David Harvey has treated us to a rich sequence of books and essays interpreting the changing global political economy within his Marxist framework – and as the pace of change in that political economy has quickened so, it seems, has his production rate! Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism is thus the latest in a long series, but it is far from just an update, though it is most certainly up-to-date.

Nor is it repetitious of previous work: it is an original, highly accessible, presentation of capital's fundamental characteristics. Harvey makes it clear from the outset that the book is about capital – not capitalism: he isolates ‘capital circulation and accumulation from everything else that is going on’ (p. 8) within a capitalist social formation, not because everything else is either uninteresting or irrelevant to the analysis of any particular realisation of capitalism's dynamics, but because capital circulation and accumulation are foundational to all such realisations. By stripping away such super-structural realisations, Harvey is able to isolate and illuminate the infrastructural fundamentals.

The book's core comprises seventeen chapters covering the fundamental contradictions, divided into three groups. The first seven are foundational, without which capitalism could not function: between use and exchange value; between the social value of labour and its monetary representation; between private property and the capitalist state; between private appropriation and common wealth; between capital and labour; between capital as a process and a thing; and what he terms ‘the contradictory unity of production and realisation’. In some respects, this is the least original part of the book since Harvey's analyses of them are well-known – though not in this form nor as an introduction to the remaining ten contradictions: the whole is much more than the sum of the parts. (Interestingly, the interactions among the seven are only spelled out – and briefly – in the short introduction to the book's next section.)

The second set of contradictions are termed moving: whereas the foundational contradictions are constants across space and time (what he also terms the ‘base laws’), the next seven – although similarly fundamental to capital's operations – are not as predictable in their outcomes, in that the new forms that emerge from each contradiction are unforeseeable; they reflect actors’ decisions that cannot be predetermined – hence the study of capital cannot be a ‘science’ as normally understood as not all of its processes ‘remain always the same’ (p. 89). Again, there are seven contradictions: technology, work and human disposability; divisions of labour; monopoly and competition (centralisation and decentralisation); uneven geographical development (then production of space); disparities of income and wealth; social reproduction; and freedom and domination. Because there are no pre-determined outcomes, the course of these contradictions and their consequences can be manipulated politically: they represent capital's degrees of freedom.

Finally, come the three dangerous contradictions: endless compound growth; capital's relations to nature; and the revolt of human nature (universal alienation). These address the issues whether within the constraints set by the foundational contradictions it is possible, through the moving ones, for capital to continue circulating and accumulating for ever – or is capitalism, in whatever form it takes, eventually bound to collapse? Reading these fascinating chapters, it is very hard not to be extremely pessimistic, but Harvey claims not to be fatalistic, following Marx in believing that ‘capital can probably continue to function indefinitely but in a manner that will provoke progressive degradation on the land and mass impoverishment, dramatically increasing social class inequality, along with dehumanisation of most of humanity, which will be held down by an increasingly repressive and autocratic denial of the potential for individual human flourishing’ (p. 220).

Such an end-state is, to Harvey and many others, not just undesirable but also unacceptable, hence his commitment to a socialist humanitarian, anti-capitalist alternatives, the focus of his concluding chapter – ‘Prospects for a happy but contested future; the promise of revolutionary humanism’. In this, as in much of his other work (the main exception is Spaces of Hope: Harvey, Reference Harvey2000), there is no blueprint, only a call, for action: ‘The only hope is that the mass of humanity will see the danger before the rot goes too far and the human and environmental damage becomes too great to repair’ (p. 293) – and he is hopeful that it will. Even if our goal is just to tame capital rather than replace it, he gives us little guidance, however. The political implications of each of the moving contradictions are addressed in a few paragraphs only at the end of each of the relevant chapters, and the four-page Epilogue – ‘Ideas for political praxis’ – with its seventeen desiderata could well form the chapter matrix for another book.

Such is the range of material covered in this relatively short – but very rarely over-condensed – book, such is the depth of the thought and clarity of the argument, that a brief review cannot illuminate all its many insights, let alone debate them. Many will wonder why seventeen contradictions – or at least the ten other than the foundational seven. I wondered, for example, whether there might be a case for a further moving contradiction, between democracy and autocracy. Harvey accepts the need for a state – or a similar institution – to regulate capital, but assumes (at least implicitly) an unbroken trajectory from pre-democratic forms through representative democracy – as we currently understand it in the ‘West’ – to what he terms ‘Oligarchic capitalist class privilege’ and ‘ruthless oligarchic power . . . now being exercised through a totalitarian democracy’ characterised by ‘the arrogance and disdain with which the affluent now view those less fortunate then themselves’ (p. 292) – an argument being mounted elsewhere, albeit in different ways and usually lacking the theoretical depth and sophistication (e.g. Coogan, Reference Coogan2013). But is that necessarily so? Was the relatively equal era of the 1940s–1970s an aberration, or could new forms of ‘democratic welfare capitalism’ be created again with the foundational contradictions operating but with a more humane superstructure?

David Harvey doesn't write textbooks – he writes books that are accessible and thought-provoking. Not for him the boxed inserts, the lists of key points at the end of each chapter, plus suggestions for further reading and perhaps questions that might be addressed. Such flim-flam is totally unnecessary – in virtually any well-written and, where relevant, illustrated book. (If this were written as a textbook, then from the outset he might have introduced us to the three types of contradiction that form the book's structure, rather than letting them emerge as we read on!) Nevertheless, Seventeen Contradictions . . . would form an ideal text for many twenty-session seminar courses on geographical political economy – each of the seventeen core chapters acting as the ‘required reading’ for a session. But it will attract a much-wider readership – and deservedly so. The quality of Harvey's opus is not declining and the clarity of his writing is such (he calls the book an ‘X-ray into the contradictions of capital’) that it is easy to benefit greatly from his insights – whether or not you agree with them.

A must read for all concerned with not only how we got into the current mess but whether we, or our descendants, will ever get out of it.