The Conversations on the Left project by Focaal opens its series with an interview with David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the CUNY Graduate Center.

David Harvey’s works have had a profound impact on the direction of leftist social science over the past four decades. A few months before this interview, in May 2013, an impressive swarm of critical geographers, urbanists, sociologists, and anthropologists converged in New York City to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Harvey’s Social Justice and the City (1973), which has become a foundational work across the social sciences. In addition to his earlier major and influential works such as Limits to Capital (1982) and The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), David Harvey remains a prolific writer. In the past three years alone he has published three important books: Rebel Cities (2012), A Companion to Marx’s Capital Volume II (2013), and Seventeen Contradictions (2014). These recent works have also found a wide readership among non-academic audiences and circulate widely among activists and organizers globally.

This interview is from December 2013, conducted in David Harvey’s office at the CUNY Graduate Center. In this interview I ask him some biographical questions about his political formation (part 1), and later about his thoughts on the state of contemporary social movements and uprisings, as well as political consciousness (part 2).