Capital’s Media, Digital Command, and the Fate of Public Communication: Reflections on David Harvey’s The Story of Capital

Abstract

David Harvey’s The Story of Capital offers a synthetic account of capital as a “working totali-ty” organised through multiple, internally related circulation processes. Harvey’s treatment of technological dynamism, platform concentration, knowledge production, artificial intelligence, surveillance, higher education, media ownership, and the state-finance nexus provides the textual basis for a communication-centred reading of digital command and public communication. The 2018 tripleC debate among Harvey, Hardt, and Negri situates that communication thread within the journal’s own exchange on universal alienation, real subsumption, social co-operation, multiplicity, and praxis. Habermas enters where his account of steering media, communicative action, and the colonisation of the lifeworld clarifies the democratic consequences of media concentration and administrative filtering. Harvey’s book clarifies the connections among digital command, time-space compression, oligarchic media power, and the shrinking institutional conditions of public communication.