US professor David Harvey provides interesting interpretations of the classic capitalist contradictions analysed by Marx in this book.

One such is between “use” and “exchange” value in the housing sector under capitalism, which has moved from provision of use values for the mass of the population to speculation in rising exchange values until the property market crashes.

Meanwhile, the pursuit of ever-higher exchange values decreases access to housing use values for a large part of the population.

Exchange values are displacing use values in health care and education as the role of the state is reduced and opportunities are opened up to private capital profiteers. Nearly everything under the sun can in principle be turned into a commodity, monetised and privatised.

It is akin to criminal practices that also enable individuals to appropriate the products of social labour.

Another contradiction is between the tendency to keep the price of labour power to its minimum and the need to maintain effective market demand, of which working-class consumer power plays a big part. Ways to mitigate that contradiction include the expansion of credit or use of the industrial reserve army such as the unemployed or immigrants, who provide the labour power necessary for the expansion of capital while providing a brake on the pressure for higher wages and better working conditions.

Harvey outlines how another way wage rates are being reduced is by cutting unemployment benefit in the US and social security in Britain, which set the lower limit to wages. Employment opportunities are then increased by employers at lower wage levels, so putting downward pressure on wages throughout the labour force.

There is of course a tendency for the rate of profit to fall as a result of labour-saving innovations, which in turn reduces the quantity of labour and along with it the force that produces value.

Marx saw certain countervailing forces in this process but Harvey points to the speed at which automation and the application of artificial intelligence are producing labour-saving technology. Recent recessions in the US have been followed by what are described as “jobless recoveries” and Harvey visualises in the long term an increasing population with no employment opportunities and a danger to the reproduction of capital itself.

While he accepts the central importance of the capital-labour contradiction, Harvey doubts if it is enough to bring about the overthrow of capitalism. He believes too that environmental crisis is not necessarily a fatal contradiction for capitalism. “Environmental disasters create abundant opportunities for a “disaster capitalism to profit handsomely ... capitalism has never shrunk from destroying people in pursuit of profit.” And he sees the oligarchs of the ruling classes taking much of the world in the direction of Engels’s 1844 description ofconditions for the working class in England.

Seventeen Contradictions is an absorbing study but it is streaked with pessimism. The struggles for a better life in China, South America and even in the Middle East encourage the optimism that in face of the cataclysms Harvey predicts humanity can stop the rot.

JOHN MOORE