I'm reading Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity, a fantastic and fascinating book which is written in clear, accessible language (something not to be overlooked). I love his good humour, the clarity of his thought and his commitment. The choice is clear, and it's a moral one: do we want to live in an increasingly plutocratic world of haves and have nots, of avaricious landlords, bankers and corporations, or do we want a fairer alternative, the kind espoused here by Harvey?
I LOVE that volume from Harvey. Only one among his many books that constantly blow me away. The modern world is incomprehensible without Harvey to point us the way. No matter your political and economic tendency (I for one count myself among the many contemporary Marxists inspired by DH) he is a thinker who demands to be contended with.
Capitalism has to constantly expand in order to avoid economic crises - and because constant expansion is impossible, it is always reeling from crisis to crisis. Capitalism is a revolutionary system as Marx himself clealry recognized - it has transformed the world beyond recognition in just a few hundred years - but it has also created problems that cannot be solved within the capitalist system. Professor Harvey does an excellent job in explaining Marx - which is a very difficult thing to do.
Why does Capitalism has to expand ? You are mistaking the Fiat-fractional-debt-monetary system with the System of private property and voluntary exchange.
You do not understand the meaning of "capitalism" which involved far more than just private property and voluntary exchange. If that were all there is to capitalism, it would not have to expand in order to avoid crises caused by "over-production". The market place is just a part of capitalism and not the essential part. Markets and voluntary exchange have existed since the dawn of history. Capitalism, however, it something fairly new and very revolutionary. Capitalism is an economic system that is motivated by the production of capital - not the production of goods and services, which are merely an incidental by-product of the production of capital. What is capital? It is, in a word, that portion of the profit that accrues to the owner of a commodity when he sells it for more than it cost him to produce or to purchase. Profit that is not consumed but are re-invested to produce more profit - that is capital. And it is the production and re-production of capital that is the engine behind the production of goods and services in a "capitalist" economic system - not the production of goods and services for the satisfaction of human needs. In a simple barter system, goods and services are produced in order to satisfy the needs of those who produce them or in order to exchange on the market for other goods or services that will do so. Under capitalism, goods and services are produced and sold in order to create capital which is then used to produce more goods and servicees in order to produce more capital. In other words, the production of capital, itself, is the end or goal of production, the production of commodities is just the means toward that end. Capital comes from profit - selling something for more than it cost to produce. Proift derives from the fact that human labor is a commodity that costs less to purchase on the labor market than the goods and services that it can produce. In other words, a worker who is paid a wage will produce goods and services that are worth more on the market than the price of his own labor - and the difference between the price of the value produced by the worker and he price of labor is profit which the owner of capital can use any way he likes - either to consume it himself or to re-invest it to produce more capital. But because capital is produced by paying less in wages for the labor than the value that the labor can produce, it means there is always a problem of having enough money in the hands of consumers to purchase the goods and services that are produced - the worker who produced them cannot purchase them at a price that would create profit (capital) for the capitalist, because in order to produce capital, the worker must be paid less than the value of what he can produce. So.... there are always, inevitably, crises of over-production under capitalsim because there is never enough money in the hands of the consumer to purchase the goods and services that can be produced for a profit. If capitalism does not expand and sell to new markets, it will suffer a contraction - and the whole engine comes to a crashing halt - this has happened repeatedly over the past couple of hundred years, since the capitalist system became the dominant econimic system in the world. Marx understood this very well and so did Keynes. It is not something that can be fixed given the nature of the system, at best it can be moderated by government spending in times of crisis, to provide a consumer to purchase the goods and services that the system produces beyond what the private consumer can purchase.
Steven Yourke Capital is not some homogeneous quantity that you can mold around and build a mathematical models as if it is single entity. Capital is heterogeneous and depreciating. Capital is consumed. The whole idea that Capital is some monolithic thing that just grows is bogus... Again you are mistaking Currency with real-things. What grows and crash every time is not Capitalistic-economic system, but the Debt-fantasy based currency system OR Socialist-planned-economies. Both of which fuel malinvestments and misallocations, (because the people at the helm think they can out-think the market), which is the true reason for the consequent crash.
Steven Yourke >> And it is the production and re-production of capital that is the engine behind the production of goods and services in a "capitalist" economic system - not the production of goods and services for the satisfaction of human needs >> Why would then capitalist build a factory (capital) to produce something which will not satisfy human needs ? If nobody buys it he goes bankrupt, capital goes to ZERO !! You are putting the cart before the horse ... what drives production is human need, not the need to have a factory for the purpose of building more factories. If people need something they will pay for it, VALUE is SUBJECTIVE. Commodity-or-products have COST (cost is not value), but their VALUE depend on how much people are willing to pay for it (i.e. value is measured by price). Consumers are dictating what is produced not the producers. Unless some "clever" guy/s decide to plan what millioins of ppl will like to have and collapse the whole thing. /sarc
You are wrong - what drives production in a capitalist economic system is the expectation of making a profit - not the meeting of human needs. The meeting of human needs, if it takes place at all, is completely incidental to the making of a profit. This is precisely what distinguishes capitalism from other, more "primitive" economic systems. If the meeting of human needs drove production, then there would not be so much desperate poverty in the world. But under capitalsim, human needs are only satisfied if the capitalist can make a profit by doing so. Consider the fact that millions of Americans today are homeless. There is a crying need for housing, millions of people are on the streets of our cities and there are lots of people ready to work and build the houses, there is no shortage of consturction workers. So, why is there such a constant shortage of housing? Because it is not sufficiently profitable for a capitalist to emoloy the workers and build the houses. And the government - at least these days - is not stepping into the breach. So, you have a society where there lots of homeless people desperate for housing and lots of construction workers desperate for employment at the same time. That is the basic problem with capitalism and why it is not a system designed to maximize the satisfaction of human needs at all. Now, do you understand why I say that it is not the meeting of human needs but the making of profit that is the motive force, the driving engine, of capitalism? In primitive societies, if you need a house, you get together with some of your neighbors and you join forces and build a house. And then you help your neighbors build their houses. And everyone in the neighborhood has a house. That is how they did it in the old west. But that was not capitalism - that was a simple form of co-operative socialism. We all pitch in and joing together to satisfy human needs. But that is not the way it is done in a modern capitalist society.
Back in the 1970’s Harvey was a mentor & took me into amazing ways of thinking & ability to shift along with his constant exploration into the depths of environment & culture
However valuable coexisting as one nation is. Nations are agreed fictions, like money. Imagined communities, as Edward Said put it. Territorial states are real, and citizenship is always ultimately based on residency and residential birthright only, as it must be to avoid ethnic cleansing. National sovereignty (for want of a better term for the sovereignty of independent states) is necessary pending world revolution, as the precondition for democracy and popular sovereignty. That's why fake bourgeois internationalisms (by definition imperialism) like the EU, WTO and IMF have to be destroyed, because they destroy both national sovereignty and democracy.
Capitalism is the official state religion in the U S A - Anyone who seriously questions it is immediately denounced as either incredibly stupid or just plain wicked. Marx has been unfairly vilified for more than a century - and mostly by people who have never actually read his magnum opus, Capital, which is an enormously challenging book to actually study and understand. But it is a very profound work - it cannot be summed up in a 30 second sound-bite - and Americans are generally so poorly educated that they cannot read or understand a book that actually makes serious demands on their attention span.
Steven Yourke okay, here's a question you might wanna answer... First, WHY are you specifically making a comparison to capitalism? Every time people promote Marxism, they always criticize one specific Foe. and, on similar terms, if Capitalism is flawed, why does it have to be replaced by Communism, or Marxism. Why not something else? Why not, say, replace it with Libertariansim, or, Anarchism, or National Socialism? Why does Marxism have to be the answer?
Steven Yourke I have 2 even better questions.!st- list Marx's work history. I mean should't we at least wanna hear from the with EXPERIENCE? 2nd- Can you start communism without capitalism? If so please explain in detail 'cause in this galaxy there is no way that is possible. And for a bonus : What society has thrived with communism? And I am talking about to a level where in only a 150 years humans went from 1000s of years of horse to jet engine airplanes and it's population owning the greatest % of cars...
TheWhispervoices I don't want to replace Capitalism with Marxism. I want to change it from full free market reign as is going on in the USA. Make it into a social democracy.
***** Just wanted to let you know that you are very ignorant about the work of Karl Marx. From what you have written it is astonishingly clear to me that you have never read anything he has ever written, nor gone to a scientific lecture on him. He did not create communism as an idea, communist parties existed in Europe while Marx still was a conservative. Facism also existed before Marx, and have much more in common with mainstream politics everywhere in the world before Marx was even born (check a dictionary to see what facism really is). You think Marx deserves HATE because he criticised capitalism?! You should read Thomas Piketty to get a modern perspective on how much Marx got right. Yes, he also got stuff wrong - but that's how science works, stupid. Marx never killed anyone or exploited anyone. He was a scientist who tried to understand how capitalism worked in a time when people where suffering immensly under it (child workers dying of fatigue after 16 hours of daily work in coal mines for instance). You should not talk about subjects you CLEARLY have not been educated in.
I’ve encounter this matter when the entity called the government sent a notice to me concerning tax. From there I began my journey into corporate structures, legal systems to natural law, language and self-education on what this realm is fundamentally all about-it’s about the acknowledgment that we do not know anything. Which makes life a great journey, if and when you can peer with the right lens... my ego wants to be “right” but in doing so, and if the world wakes up to and went through the depression and angst I had in the last 7 years... man, it’s going to get crazy. Moderation and staying level-headed is the most important state that people can be in, at this critical juncture in time. With proper actions built by envisioning the next 100 years would be a good step to take.
I like what he says about housing. It's crazy that a villager in Uganda can throw up a mud hut in one week, while in the industrialised nations it takes quarter of a century to pay for a faux cave with running water and electricity piped to it. Just ridiculous, that's not progress at all.
Professor Harvey finally gets round to discussing Marx's observations on rentier privilege in response to a question. As I argue, this is the aspect of our societal challenges that require much deeper public discussion.
I am so happy that he has no solutions. I have the only correct solution. We need to implement the real 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'. The real Dictatorship of the proletariat consists of two Laws that must be implemented: 1) Implement the real UBI. 2) Implement the Perpetual Limited Speed Purge Allowance (PLSPA)
@@MrDXRamirez My comments are getting deleted on this page but i'll try one more time.. In short, part of the modern interpretation of the dictatorship of the proletariat is called Perpetual Limited Speed Purge Allowance (PLSPA). (One purge per person per year allowed no questions asked; the purge right is non-transferable; assistance to purge is a crime; purges can not be accumulated; nobody is excluded from being purged; self-defence rules apply when subjected to a purge attempt; all purge events must be logged in a public database; the purge can take place at any time and any place. Those are the basic rules mostly) After the first purge wave the society will become harmonious and peaceful. ... and it will cleanse itself. Those who want too much Power or Wealth will get purged for sure by those who don't want extreme Power or Wealth .... and the society will welcome it. !!! The correct approach to ensure a prosperous and just society is a free market economy with corrective mechanisms working on the side in parallel and independently to compensate for the market's inherent problems (which are the creation of Extreme concentration of Wealth and Poverty at the same time i.e Empty houses and homeless people). Those mechanisms are 1) The Real UBI (for perpetual re-distribution of Wealth), 2) The Perpetual Limited Speed Purge Allowance (PLSPA), 3) A voting system called 'Most Liked, Least Hated' gets elected. (It eliminates highly polarising candidates) which, together, implement the true, real meaning of 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'. !!!
@@MrDXRamirez Classes are defined by wealth owned and power controlled. Oppression of a class, however, is a choice made by the oppressor. Productive forces in the society are promoted by the needs of the humans with disposable Wealth/Income. The way forward towards a better society is to increase and maintain a strong minimum purchasing power of the end-consumer using the magic formula. (Magic Formula: 'Your minimum Purchasing Power' = 'minimum wage' + 'Benefits payments' + 'The real UBI' - 'Cost of dignified living from cradle to grave' - 'Taxes, fees, penalties')
I'm still astonished that the 'authorised community' (in the academy, the media, etc) has failed over twenty years to even remotely discover the horizontalist/grassrootes/grassroutes alternative economic communites (eg here in London) that have lead to Occupy London's September 2015 adoption of the plan for Co-operative Socialism as an alternative to capitalism. Or am I . . .
+John Courtneidge The simple answer to the naivity and incapability of the folk politics to scale up is this quote: "Goldman sachs doesn't care if you raise chickens" Read Nick Srnicek's Inventing the future.
+Jakub Ferenc would you mind expanding a bit on your comment? I think I understand the claim, but since I haven't gotten around to reading the text you recommend, I don't see the rationale behind the quote. thanks
Great talk. I think one must also consider that the rich are in a position to take more rational decisions. One must remember that a person that is trying to survive from day to day is not in a position to make strategic decisions due his more irrational or desperate existence. Perhaps we should find ways to empower rationalized thought more, so that optimal collaborative game theory can take root.
The major contradictions of capitalism are: (i) the tendency to keep wages down to increase profit but the need to have wage earners buy what is produced; and (ii) the need for never ending growth with limited resources and stagnant wages.
and I've always thought it seemed unethical and immoral to use others in desperation to make a personal profit. To benefit the company sure but not to buy the CEO another fancy yacht. That's slavery.
The failure of Marx was to recognize, as Henry George recognized, that the reasons why housing is substandard or scarce or unaffordable is because of the privatization of the rent of land. The one, most important reform of property law and taxation that was never achieved was the societal capture of land values. The result is that those who hold deeds to land enjoy an unearned (sometimes imputed sometimes realized when land is leased to actual producers) rental income stream, capitalized by market forces into higher and higher land prices over time. Speculation in land and the hoarding of land is rewarded in every society by the low effective rate of taxation on rent. However, in societies where land is owned by the state and not offered for private development under competitive bidding conditions, the problem exists that land does not yield a fund with which to pay for public goods and services. Government is essentially forced to rely on the extraction and sale of natural resources to raise the funds to pay for production of capital goods and consumer goods. If Marxists really want policies that will pull us toward full employment societies, pressure must be applied to achieve the fundamental changes in how societies raise revenue advanced by Henry George. This fund can then be used, if citizens democratically vote to do so, to provide a real safety net and quality social welfare services.
+Edward Dodson The Georgist perspective has a clear geographical aspect - I wonder if the speaker knows about George. I've heard that Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of the Labour Party in the UK, is listening to some LVTers.
You forget the flip side of Georgism (the most important side) - no taxes on labour or capital, ie no taxes on work, no taxes on entrepreneurship, no taxes on creativity. Only one tax - on unearned wealth.
This is a very good talk and people need to open their eyes. I have some simple recommendations for at least getting humanity out of the clutches of the beast called capitalism. WHAT IS THE BEST SYSTEM: THE ONE THAT RUNS ON THE PRINCIPLE OF MODERATION So the SYSTEM IS MODERATELY capitalist and MODERATELY socialist. This is, I think, the best starting point. _What we need is to RECOGNISE the fundamental importance of the welfare state. It has been shown by behavioural psychologists that human beings are not rational quite a lot of the time. Therefore, to base human economics on self-interest is disastrous as this will lead the people to lose heavily if they should make wrong decisions. The fact remains that we need to provide basic minimums to all people. Beyond these minimums(house, healthcare, education, food), we need to allow some opportunity to people to profit from their talent, but not so much that 1% become the masters and the rest the slaves._ To ensure that elites are not formed we need to have *DIRECT DEMOCRACY.* People need to vote representatives out of power and laws WHENEVER they feel. So if more than 50% or 60% of the people of a country vote to repeal a law, the law is considered repealed. This follows the SWISS-styled *REFERENDUMS AND DIRECT DEMOCRACY*. *So to have a good system we need to have SCANDINAVIAN SOCIALISM AND SWISS DIRECT DEMOCRACY as a start. Beyond this, as Professor David Harvey has suggested, the people can choose to experiment and bring changes that can be beneficial* CHECK OUT THE STORY OF KSHAMA SAWANT AND THE 15-DOLLAR MINIMUM WAGE SHE HELPED PASS IN SEATTLE. She took no money from corporations, took only 40,000 dollars of her salary and gave the rest to social movements. You guys need to wake up and take action. You need to field independent candidates who can help pass laws that are beneficial to you. Look, people, it is time for humanity to mature and to demand a decent life. You have been treated like children for too long, and either you realise that the way forward is to have an equal say in running the world, or you are going to remain slaves forever. So spread the
The truth is only absolute and there is no room for inconsistency.Either go ancap or ancom.You are saying that because people dont always make rational decisions a fascist govt(this includes direct democracy as it enslaves everybody to everyone which are external coercive forces) needs to set a welfare state.The point if individual freedom is that people can make mistakes and to suffer from those mistakes.
Harvey is flat out killing the game. Let me change that, he's been killing the game for a hot minute. Kyrie Irving is the David Harvey of the NBA. Damn!
He might address it elsewhere, but in the 3 crisis contradictions (dichotomies?) he seems to skirt the possibility of a locally managed steady state economy, which would have the additional advantage of being easier for people to understand or at least grow constructive expectations (after a few years of participation) or perhaps the possibility and benefits of a well controlled dynamic 'homeostasis' between at least the production & demand sides, and also the stagnation vs speed functions of capital, in sequestration of capital (hoarding by the wealthy) and the lack of capital (predation debt by the poor) to the detriment of all.
Relistening to this and ohhh man around 1:04:00 No matter how firmly the moderator insists that the audience gets to the point and not hog the mic in Q&A, there's _always_ some boomer who disregards the admonition and goes on to pontificate aimlessly 1:06:35 was pitch perfect
Here's the problem, human labor is inefficient. machines can do most the work human labor does, and as technology progresses, more human labor jobs are lost. To get to a real alternative, work towards ending the scarcity system, utilize machines instead of human labor, and accept the fact not everyone needs to work. Innovation and creativity, are the things machines can't do. yet. Educate and inform society, get away from the old ideas of scarcity, fighting over resources, and ignorant societies. Technocracy and resource based economies are the direction we should be headed. Human labor is becoming obsolete, and the economics based around human labor is as well.
Well, that's exactly what socialists propose. The problem with productivity gains under capitalism is that it all goes to owners of capital and not labour. Indeed, as you point out, labour is shed and wages are cut when there are increases in productivity.
If you want to make Marx as you argue him accessible, give the Man here a grant to make a cartoon/multimedia presentation of it, as they do with the TED videos.
We need to move away from binary thinking in order to explore alternatives. This requires a trinary model which recognises both 'sub-systems' and their constant dance of alternation, but focusses on the whole and uses dialectic method to co-discover solutions. I think this is a brave step forward...the momentum needs ot be maintained.
Exchange value system is demonstrably the best system. We have tried using use value system but you always end up with concentrated power to make decisions. Soviet Union could only calculate "use" value by copying Sears catalogues and world prices because there is no great benevolent entity that could define and communicate what the current use price for each current product and each current need is. As a result you get greater inefficiency of the producer which means you work more and get less. Also such system offers no principle in which you would define what people need and what they don't need. Exchange system discards need for want and afford which is clear to most of us. In modern economics the differentiation between exchange and use is discarded because of that. Also because the conjecture that value is always subjective seem to be true.
The problem with economics in the soviet Union was that it was controlled by bureaucrats. An efficient Marxist economic model would be one in which the economy was run democratically.
I would make the case that it would be even less efficient. As much as I understand the sentiment behind such system it fails to perform in practise. Soviet Union had at one point 15 million prices to decide upon. Bureaucrats worked hard trying to make sense what use value would be and that's why they resorted to copying exchange system prices. The problem was that those exchange prices didn't reflect the real market state in Soviet Union, hence the shortages and inefficiencies. Could you imagine a population of 300 million democratically deciding what is the use value of 15 million different products? Considering that now it is even more prices I'm going to have to resort to argument of ignorance that I cannot imagine a democratic system that would make these kinds of decisions. I would invite you to look at I, Pencil story by Leonard Read to understand how exchange system resolves these problems. I'm not saying that it is perfect but in practice it works better then any other system that has been conceived by far.
mikedd56 I agree that we shouldn't have one entity controlling the economy.I would like to see more democracy so that EVERY ONE controls the economy. Do you think there isn't red tape under private entities?
Dash Antony Look I have tried to explain long and hard why it would be inefficient to have direct democracy. Do you think it is possible to vote on 15 billion decisions? If the answer is not the not EVERY ONE controls the economy. The companies with a lot of red tape become inefficient and are eventually replaced by ones without. Ever hear of a company laying off workers because of the costs? Please do take a corse on basic economics because is seems you don't understand what inefficient means.
Zhiloreznik This is why, price mechanism can, and should be maintained. What I am interested in is redistribution of wealth. The current system is a corporate neo-imperialism system. Most of the rich is horded by the few westerners while most of the world( non-white) are is poverty. This is unjust. The gain of trade by the winners should be returned to increase the productivity capacities of the losers so that over time, trade does lift the rest of the world out of poverty.
The financial crisis was caused because government did away with exchange value (lowered requirements for low income people to buy homes to 0% downpayment, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae took on 50% toxic assets). The government did everything they could to get people's hands on mortgages and took on all the risks associated with them that it created a moral hazard in the market.
Haha... why doesn't the presenter sit down among the audience so the talk can get going? It just feels awkward having him sit there next to Harvey, without getting any attention anyway. Weird.
Wow..I kinda understand why people still believe in marxism (I used to a little bit in the past); this professor seems like a nice guy to be friend with, a raw model citizen but I totally disagree with him. His conference is not about contradictions of capitalism. He just points out some flaws (which most are subjective or emotional) and anyway are coming from crony-capitalism (from state and central banks interventions) and not true capitalism where overproductions for the sake of speculations wouldn't be profitable (check out the austrian economics theory of cycle).
Don't give any of the "true" shit. We live in capitalism. There is private ownership of the means of production. Just like there isn't any "true" socialism. Which is worker ownership of the means of production. You either have one or the other. We have the former.
Rackets stifle progress because they are trying to freeze things in place, and, Planned obsolescence just creates modes of consumption based on spectacle.
I have to say, I've yet to listen to a proponent of Marxism that was concise and clear in his or her arguments. Is it a requirement to be absentminded and vague when preaching Marxism?
definitely +Kiam Ming Chui he is excellent and you will know the history of the new deal like few else after a few months. also you do realise he was trying to explain political economy within an entirely social context, im afraid it is most likely your failure rather than harveys try taking a few notes that helps for me.
Forget Marxists and read Marx, who by the way always said he wasn't a Marxist. As paradoxical as that may sound, it speaks volumes about the ton of misinterpretations and just misrepresentations of Marx's work. His work is concise and clear. If it is voluminous, it's because despite being concise and clear, he just says so much, because there is so much to say about capitalism. So what I highly recommend is sitting down with Capital I and trudging through it: it will reveal itself to you in a grandiose fashion.
Macro-economics is very very complicated. Human society and political economy are also very very complicated. Anyone giving you a concise little fairy tale about all economics and governance amounting to balancing your import-export ratio is giving you a wholly non-representative abstraction of reality.
Actually, Volumes 2, 3, and his notebooks all remained unfinished when he died, so it's very difficult to extrapolate much of his later work. Likewise it's hard to piece all of it together because each volume uses a different framework to hilight certain aspects but which prove difficult to fit with each of the other volumes. Your statement is very true only about Capital Vol.1 and prior. Harvey's new work, after studying Marx for something like 60 years, is to fulfill an intention that Marx himself had but died short of completing, which was to resolve the extremely different pictures of political economy given in each of the 3 volumes into a cohesive and holistic Marxian value theory. The old Marx stuff isn't perfected or even complete! Please read Marx but also give Lefebvre, Harvey, and others a fair shake
@@felixlipski3956 they mean "if there is in fact a viable alternative to capitalism then I've been duped my whole life and I would not be able to come to terms with that"
I haven't listened to the video yet but I'm guessing he leans heavily on Marx? My economic theorizing has taken me in a different direction~its very true to say there is something majorly askew about Our Market Centric Economy and in fact its so askew its leading to Cataclysmic Clashes with Nature. Even so its still rather amazing what it does do~organizes billions of people to specialize to create products and share them its very creative in a way but like an addict is creative or someone with OCD, But the law of nature is Balance in flow~ outflow and this economic machine is calibrated in its core with near complete ignorance of natures balances.We need a Scientific overhaul of Market ECO~Nomics a systems recalibration starting with the Monetary System!!
I challenge the High Priest David Harvey to answer my two questions directly on this posting. They are; 1 . Can any Marxist on here give me a system in the world that has ever worked and benefitted the poor that has NOT had capitalism and largely free trade as the predominant mechanism? and question 2. Can any Marxist give me country that has worked and lifted people out of poverty where the predominant mechanism HAS been free trade?
Cuba has been able to turn its meager amount of wealth into prosperity for the working class. Even more impressive, they have been able to do all of this while under the thumb of brutal economic sanctions and the collapse of the USSR! In Cuba, 85 percent of the population owns their own homes, mortgage-free. Cubans have unrestricted access to high quality health care and a guarantee of a free public education through the university level. Cuba has universal literacy. Every Cuban is guaranteed a basic income, and a job if they can work. Cuba ranks extremely highly in terms of nutrition, childhood mortality rates, healthy birth weights, immunization, and life expectancy - all higher than the US! Yes it is true that Cuba is still poor, but the poor in Cuba live far better than the poor in capitalist countries. At least Cuba has an excuse - the entire country is poor, so it makes sense that the people are poor. What is the US's excuse?
Elijah Redarmy If Cuba is so wonderful why do people strap themselves to flotation devices made from garbage float 90 miles in shark infested open ocean to escape it? 85% of the population lives in homes propped up by jury rigged beams as the Government restricts who can do the work to repair said buildings and how much you can spend on such repairs or improvements and will fine you or confiscate said home if you are in violation. Free education would mean it was provided without taxation so in reality is was not "Free" and it is just a tool for indoctrination by the government brainwashing people into believing it's necessary for survival. Only if you are a member of the communist party do you gain access to the best health care and they restrict who can join the communist party. The reality is bureaucrats of communist nations constantly produce false data so they will not be replaced or killed.
Barskor1 They are genuine questions that I pose (I admit the bit about the High Priest is a little childish) and they do not, as far as I can see, need in-depth answers. But they have not been answered because as history shows, there aren't any countries that have lifted the general standard of living of people including the poor without large freedom of capitalism and trade. I have read a large body of work because of my general interest in history, mainly of the USSR and watch debates like this. To believe in something without proof of it ever existing or working you need a leap of faith. Prof. Harvey believes the writing of Marx, hence his religious title. I am of an open mind so if you can point to any evidence it would be helpful, or any books that may show this to be the case that I am wrong and Prof. Harvey is right?
Richard Stevens Well Richard I agree with you and in my opinion Professor Harvey is a Wall Banger pseudo intellectual nut case with no clue about economics. I will say without capitalism 90% or more of the worlds knowledge and technology simply would not exist.
Around 1.23.00ish David Harvey is talking about a book by someone, who's name I'm almost definitely going to misspell (hence, my problem haha), called 'Caines' but doesn't mention the name of the book. Can anyone tell me the actual spelling of the authors name and the title of the book please?
Conor Davidson it’s Keynes as in Keynesian Economics which was the dominant economic philosophy of the ‘new deal’ in United States up until the 1970s. At that point the investor class rebelled because of extremely high taxes and the strength of the trade unions. In the 1980s neoliberal Reaganomics was born which is the polar opposite of Keynesian. There are lot of people with nearly religious faith in one or the other but of course the most happiness and stability is found somewhere in the middle. Neoliberalism/Austrian policies benefit the wealthy investor class Keynsian economics benefits the working and middle classes. As the speaker said, we’re stuck alternating between the two theories because either one implemented simplistically creates a situation of monopolistic stagnation/exclusion followed by revolution.
in effect it has ended, what we have today is not a "free market", that idea has run it's course. profit margins are synthetically managed by the 1%. the next crash is inevitable and will be the final nail in the coffin of capitalism. we have trillions in ghost capital, leveraging is at unrecoverable rates. these are not complicated facts, it's very basic economics and has already been tested in the 2007-08 crash, and nothing has changed, they are up to the same tricks that brought down the last economic crash bailed out by taxpayers... the only thing stopping it is creative new ways to squeeze capital out of 3rd world countries, there is a limit to this manipulation... when it goes this next time it will go all the way.
Anarcho Capitalism is Contradiction Actually not. Again, it's obvious, much like these dusty, crusty reds, that you have no idea how business work. Business is 60/30/10 - 60% Sales, 30% Negotiation, 10% what the company does. *Maybe*, after a long run of market dominance, that 10% number can go to 20%. But never higher than that. That's why your "workers" so often get screwed. Production is just not that important. How do I know this? Because I actually ran my own business for over 9 years. SALES is king. SELL OR DIE.
Why do you think running a business makes you more qualified to study world economic systems? If anything, I wouldn't trust someone with a business to explain it to me. They have to justify their own position within the system, so you're sure to get a very distorted vision. It's like trusting a hypnotist on the medical applications of hypnosis, or a fox hunter about the necessity of hunting foxes in managing the local ecosystem. You'd have to be mad! Get an intelligent academic involved, like a sensible person would..
Farco Any "economic theory" of capitalism that does not address Sales and Negotiation is a joke. This is why the left fails over and over and over again economically. Marx was a good historian, but he had no clue about his own present, or the future. 60/30/10.
+Haj Tom Economics studies means, ends values, choice, profit, loss, preference, and cost(human action). A Resource based economy will not be without human action. Study Economics.
Someone should tell David Harvey that it is better to keep his mouth shut and thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. It must be a sad life for him having spent 30 years reading and theorizing on one book (Das Kapital) and at the same time knowingly ignore the obvious truth that capitalism has created the greatest nations in history.
TL;DR: An imperative, an insult and a bit of 'ideological patriotism'. Wonderful argument pal! Also... "and thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."?
Aren't you knowingly ignoring how the current form of bastardized capitalism we are heading for the worst economic collapse since the fall of Rome. Perhaps even worse than Rome. More people are going to be effected for sure.
Tenebrousable Funny, we don't have capitalism in common with Rome. What we do have in common with the fall of Rome is a central government that is inefficient and unwise with how it spends money and prints currency. Did you know that the Roman government debased their currency so much that they refused to accept it (their own currency) for payment on taxes due? If we fall like Rome it's going to be because our government is acting like Rome, e.g. quantitative easing. I commend you for looking to history in an effort to foretell the future. However, I think you're letting your political bias get in the way of what actually happened in history. Hit the books again, and I'm sure you'll find that the most successful nations throughout history are those that have (at least somewhat) free economies. Start with Hong Kong. That's a very interesting story.
sschmalz1 Well, I agree with that comment. Seems to me you should be agreeing with David Harvey too then at least to some degree, at least enough to not think him of as a fool.
Tenebrousable Hmmm, we have some disconnect here, and I'm not sure what it is. Not sure what I could have written to lead you to believe I have anything remotely in common with this Marxist.
Feel free to name any... and as a rule they and their style of writing are far from charismatic. Harvey incidentally writes far better than he speaks. But most social scientists rarely write anything worth reading.
Well we are referring to different things I think. I am referring to charismatic speaking, you're speaking about charismatic writing. In general I agree with you, the social science literature are usually not terribly interesting to read but in this case these fellows are presenting the material verbally in a way that would make some one want to hurt themselves for a distraction lol
Academic writing is rather hard to make charismatic in my experience, but it can be done with speaking and lecturing. See Richard Feynman for instance. His books are great but even he does not make the material breezy. When he speaks, however, it's fun to just listen to him. That's charism.
I didn't count 17 'contradictions'. And the supposed 'contradictions are not contradictions in any sense. How is there a contradiction between money and property. What is meant by a contradiction between production and realisation. The problem with Marxism is that its ideas are not supported by either data or experience. And there is plenty of both.
With all its flaws it is not difficult to conclude Capitalism an abysmal failure. I suggest those who accept only a few flaws carry on reading and observing and in time must surely conclude Capitalism has been good for the ' West ' but a disaster for most people on earth and the Planet itself. I think it could be said that if you think Capitalism will solve World Poverty, Pandemics, excessive carbon emissions, looking after the weak in any society, fair distribution of wealth, pensions, education, etc perhaps it is time to have a review of ones conclusions about how mankind should live and organize a style of Government exploiting the planet with sustainable food growth and allowing most of our fellow animals to exist. Some controls and restrictions are surely necessary but of course this is against the so called "laws' of Capitalism.
good story .. but combine it with the challenges of the internet media revolution, that gives free space for populisms that have no interest in finding a common truth, vision on reality
I don't know that much about Marx, so I see he shows the flaws of Capitalism is great detail, but does he provide an alternative? I don't know if communism is a debated concept on what it should look like and how it should function, but are all communist societies supposedly trying to fulfill Marxist ideals?
Chris Tully Plus, I don't know if this is just rubbish, but for someone who is earning 400 a month in a factory, and someone is earning 4 million in an office, does that mean they are literally working 10,000 times harder than the other to justify earning that much more?
Chris Tully Chris Tully well, that's a very good point: Marx wrote Capital and had a big project in mind, but never finished writing it, so we don't have a direct view of "how should society be" according to Marx. Capital is a HUGE body of work and it's just a fraction of what Marx wanted to write, so we will never know. Communist parties have debated long and hard about what kind of world would reflect Marx's perspective, but so far they have only come up with horrible dictatorships or bureaucratic economies... and the governments that have been elected to create a socialist or communist society have been violently erased by the US (like Chile in 1973). But communists supporting dictatorships is just (for me) stupid. Communism seeks the common good, a common goal... and dictatorships are just the opposite. I'm a marxist and I stand against state and bureaucratic violence. So yeah, Marx never proposed any "ideals", he just pointed out the problems of capitalism using a dialectical model of analysis. It's hard to get around it, because it's not the way we are used to think about authors nowadays... now, authors must promote an idea or model, or at least we expect them to provide us a thing (an alternative, a vision, a specific notion to follow or study), but Marx's work is similar to Hegel in that sense: their work is not a "thing" you can follow, it's the description of processes and how they affect or determine us. In every dialectical analysis, the process between the objects are more important and more real than the objects themselves. A simple example of this: the concept of "class struggle" arises from the fact that there's a social exploitation we can all see in real life: people working countless hours and making barely enough money to survive, while others just own the factories or put their money in the bank and live amazing lives thanks to interests. If there's an exploitation (a process in which somebody lives at the exploitation and expenses of others), then there must be groups of people who are in a relationship of exploitation (classes). Therefore, the way to organize this tension would be to analyze the two classes participating in this process: exploiters and exploited. "Classes", for Marx, are not "rich" or "poor" (that's the notion we have today of such terms). "Classes" are just elements that you can analyze in relationship to the notion of "exploitation". Class struggle, therefore, is a way of mapping elements FROM THE PROCESS, NOT FROM THE OBJECTS. Also, the guy earning 400 a month and the owner of the factory earning 4 million is a subject that Marx talks in depth in Capital. You might want to give this great book a shot. ;)
Chris Tully oh, it's serious study and consideration, that's the main reason very few people take the time and read it, and the overwhelming vast majority just repeat the myths they have read and heard about Marx, instead of study his body of work. if you want to get into "Capital", I would highly suggest to watch David Harvey's series of lectures here on youtube about "Capital". He analyses the whole book and guides you through the process, so you won't get lost in technical details. ;)
Chris Tully I feel Marx did great work analyzing capitalism but went astray on his belief that the state will dismantle capitalism. First I will state what I feel is the main contradiction in capitalism, then what I believe the best solution is. It is a contradiction for capital to make capital for a private individual as capital along can not produce value. All wealth comes from labor-value, combined with use-value. Contrary to what economists are now taught and what the mainstream media tell us, subjective-value only fucks with the balance. Corporations do not pay for advertising; we all do; as advertising firms make big money and consume lots of stuff other people need to make. Corporations don't pay for election campaigns, workers do. We, the workers pay for the wars and Wall street etc, etc. When the tastes of rich people propel different products upwards, this imbalance between price and real-value must be offset somewhere else, by some other commodity selling below its value. Simple laws of nature. Also, progress leads to a tendency to use labor saving technology to increase productivity, and over time the capitalist will use relatively more constant capital; which cannot be a source of surplus; which leads to a Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, which leads to repeated crisis known as boom and bust cycles. The capitalist relies on this capital; because in business, if you don't go forward, you go backward, the strong will exploit the weak. Laid of workers are simply displaced. It would be more logical to simple divide work better then to keep trying to make another useless product. This is why half the world work long hard hours for subsistence wages. When a capitalist expresses his economic freedom he approaches on others, and economic freedom depends on how much capital you have. The more saturated global markets become; the more this becomes the case. Participatory economics is a concrete modal for an alternative political economy to capitalism, based on economic democracy. Capital is property of the commons, along with intellectual property and resources; to be passed to the next generation as a gift. The work place is a democracy, and communities plan what the community wants. People are free to educate themselves for higher paid jobs or work longer or shorter hours if they want more material wealth, but people only get rewarded for what society deems their efforts worth. If people feel a law is silly, like many corporate driven laws are, they can simply negotiate a change. Apposing views in the negotiation process are sorted out with proposals and counter proposals that are designed to reach the middle ground that gets the highest consensus. Its a labor-value system that makes capitalism look primitive. equality = freedom/you can not have one without the other. "The [participatory economics] approach is a stimulating challenge to conventional thinking. It is carefully argued and the conclusions plausible and well worth considering seriously." - Noam Chomsky.
Yeah, go to "La Villa 31" in Buenos Aires, Argentina! every year is bigger...Argentina has so many social programs that people don't even need to work anymore, if they "can't" afford it, they even get free tv set so they can watch free soccer on free cable! socialism contradiction #3
Interesting, but does he ever tell us the 17 contradictions? Maybe he does, but it would be hard to list what the 17 are as presented. Bakunin might have had better ideas than Marx.
redbloodblackflag Well, the sort of "voluntary" theory doesn't appeal to me because it seems to allow the rich too much leeway. Too much emphasis on not paying taxes, which reminds me of the Republican Party really.
+John Yorks hmmm...the US spends more and more, in relation to the GDP but the rich are to blame for the country's monetary woes...makes sense. when millions upon millions of Americans ( and non Americans) have multiple children they can't afford, its the wealthy who are to blame when there's no money for a new school. when the Government, in direct confliction with the law, flood the labor market with millions of illegal immigrants, its the wealthy who are to blame for stagnant wages. yes, we oppose higher taxes because the Government has far exceeded it's constitutional authority and continues waste money at a breath taking pace. don't tell me you need more money to operate this country when billions of dollars are given away in foreign aid. half of this nation pays no federal income taxes but it's the wealthy who are the fault. nearly 70% of illegals are on public assistance, which is also against the law, I might add, but it's the wealthy who are to blame. capital gains taxes are lower because the money's already been taxed before; its the second bite of the apple. the left have it figured out: take all you can from the makers and support the leeches because they'll keep voting for those hand outs.
Bakunin (and Kropotkin) are excellent when it comes to the actual solutions to capitalism. Marx helps us understand and thereby undermine/attack capitalism, spreading class consciousness.
technical point i never understood - and forgot to ask the experts, my faullt - to compare use value with exchange value one has to monetise - by which i here mean 'put a money price on' the former. How does one do it? Please help! PS: (added 24 hours or so later) Is the key not to try and compare them *quantitatively* at all? - if can't do it; that's another (too-aphoristic) way of expression the contradiction between use value and exchange value. The logical thing then is to get out capitalism altogether. Add to this: what *is* money? even 'derivative money' - notes (bills in US-english) that used to directly represent precious metals... in the USA: until 1972... but a 20-pound note doesnt mean that any more... basically Capitalism doesnt make sense... not in the sense that pure math justifies itself primarily by aesthetics within a contradiction-free-ness paradigm (that's the ideal - so dont throw Godel at me please!) These stupid-sounding remarks of mine are *all* addressed and answered in David Harvey's lecture if I understand it right ... very instructive speech!
quote: >>> From this ancient beginning, Adam Smith launched his monumental work “Wealth of Nations” which was perhaps the first attempt at turning the study of man’s economy into a science. Unfortunately, by the mid 19th century, Marx began to take economics away from the course of a science and into the realm of political philosophy. Thus, economics today as taught in most universities has transgressed from a science of observation and laws into a means of social philosophy by which the question is no longer observation and study but social manipulation to effect a desired end result. Consequently, the history of economic thought is one plagued by a battle between the science of economy and the philosophy of economy for social justice. It is important to understand that this battle between social justice and the study of the economy has resulted in economics becoming less of a science and more of a political tool to achieve a distinct purpose. ... Today, economics faces the same crisis between those who are interested in the study of what actually makes the economy tick and those who merely pretend to be economists as a means to enforce their personal political agenda of social justice. Such beliefs in social justice belong to philosophy and not to the science of economics. >>
In my opinion studying economics is barely scientific. It should be in the interest of everybody profiting from capitalism that social injustice does not increase too much.
I'd be more for socialism if we were not attached to third world countries shoot our population projections almost entirely suggest growth through immigration. Capitalism has it's place. population growth is a major contributing factor to the dislike of socialism. We can have socialism but not in a growing world.
The first globally traded 'resource' of captured Africans provided the labour capital for the private control of cotton and sugar production. This system of capitalism is only focussed on the large generation of profits for the few and for that reason is very resistant to a changing philosophy of distributing wealth for the benefit of all. Slavery wrought capitalism, the three pillars of which are Mercantilism, Colonialism and imperialism. To get back to the more egaliatarian view of our common interests as expoused by Prof Harvey, a revolution needs to take place to rid the world of the Morgan, the Rothschilds, the Rockefeller, the Edison and the Ford system that leaves so much of this world in the vacuum of globally generated profits for the mineral poor and structural adjustment by the IMF for the mineral rich. This is the perverse foundational contradiction of the capitalist system. So whether the revolution needs to be a social democracy that allows all to come around the table of plenty on an equitable basis, or one of a dialectical materialism, it still requires a revolution or alternative to this structural capitalist system!
intro ends at 7:47
+Alexi Martinaios Yes thanks!!!!
God be praised, thank you! All this just to listen to the point of view coming from a Marxist!
Stephen Blackwell thank you 🤣
These MCs do get carried away... thx.
phew..
I'm reading Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity, a fantastic and fascinating book which is written in clear, accessible language (something not to be overlooked). I love his good humour, the clarity of his thought and his commitment. The choice is clear, and it's a moral one: do we want to live in an increasingly plutocratic world of haves and have nots, of avaricious landlords, bankers and corporations, or do we want a fairer alternative, the kind espoused here by Harvey?
I LOVE that volume from Harvey. Only one among his many books that constantly blow me away. The modern world is incomprehensible without Harvey to point us the way. No matter your political and economic tendency (I for one count myself among the many contemporary Marxists inspired by DH) he is a thinker who demands to be contended with.
Capitalism has to constantly expand in order to avoid economic crises - and because constant expansion is impossible, it is always reeling from crisis to crisis. Capitalism is a revolutionary system as Marx himself clealry recognized - it has transformed the world beyond recognition in just a few hundred years - but it has also created problems that cannot be solved within the capitalist system. Professor Harvey does an excellent job in explaining Marx - which is a very difficult thing to do.
Why does Capitalism has to expand ?
You are mistaking the Fiat-fractional-debt-monetary system with the System of private property and voluntary exchange.
You do not understand the meaning of "capitalism" which involved far more than just private property and voluntary exchange. If that were all there is to capitalism, it would not have to expand in order to avoid crises caused by "over-production". The market place is just a part of capitalism and not the essential part. Markets and voluntary exchange have existed since the dawn of history. Capitalism, however, it something fairly new and very revolutionary. Capitalism is an economic system that is motivated by the production of capital - not the production of goods and services, which are merely an incidental by-product of the production of capital. What is capital? It is, in a word, that portion of the profit that accrues to the owner of a commodity when he sells it for more than it cost him to produce or to purchase. Profit that is not consumed but are re-invested to produce more profit - that is capital. And it is the production and re-production of capital that is the engine behind the production of goods and services in a "capitalist" economic system - not the production of goods and services for the satisfaction of human needs. In a simple barter system, goods and services are produced in order to satisfy the needs of those who produce them or in order to exchange on the market for other goods or services that will do so. Under capitalism, goods and services are produced and sold in order to create capital which is then used to produce more goods and servicees in order to produce more capital. In other words, the production of capital, itself, is the end or goal of production, the production of commodities is just the means toward that end. Capital comes from profit - selling something for more than it cost to produce. Proift derives from the fact that human labor is a commodity that costs less to purchase on the labor market than the goods and services that it can produce. In other words, a worker who is paid a wage will produce goods and services that are worth more on the market than the price of his own labor - and the difference between the price of the value produced by the worker and he price of labor is profit which the owner of capital can use any way he likes - either to consume it himself or to re-invest it to produce more capital. But because capital is produced by paying less in wages for the labor than the value that the labor can produce, it means there is always a problem of having enough money in the hands of consumers to purchase the goods and services that are produced - the worker who produced them cannot purchase them at a price that would create profit (capital) for the capitalist, because in order to produce capital, the worker must be paid less than the value of what he can produce. So.... there are always, inevitably, crises of over-production under capitalsim because there is never enough money in the hands of the consumer to purchase the goods and services that can be produced for a profit. If capitalism does not expand and sell to new markets, it will suffer a contraction - and the whole engine comes to a crashing halt - this has happened repeatedly over the past couple of hundred years, since the capitalist system became the dominant econimic system in the world. Marx understood this very well and so did Keynes. It is not something that can be fixed given the nature of the system, at best it can be moderated by government spending in times of crisis, to provide a consumer to purchase the goods and services that the system produces beyond what the private consumer can purchase.
Steven Yourke
Capital is not some homogeneous quantity that you can mold around and build a mathematical models as if it is single entity. Capital is heterogeneous and depreciating. Capital is consumed. The whole idea that Capital is some monolithic thing that just grows is bogus...
Again you are mistaking Currency with real-things. What grows and crash every time is not Capitalistic-economic system, but the Debt-fantasy based currency system OR Socialist-planned-economies.
Both of which fuel malinvestments and misallocations, (because the people at the helm think they can out-think the market), which is the true reason for the consequent crash.
Steven Yourke
>>
And it is the production and re-production of capital that is the engine behind the production of goods and services in a "capitalist" economic system - not the production of goods and services for the satisfaction of human needs
>>
Why would then capitalist build a factory (capital) to produce something which will not satisfy human needs ? If nobody buys it he goes bankrupt, capital goes to ZERO !!
You are putting the cart before the horse ... what drives production is human need, not the need to have a factory for the purpose of building more factories.
If people need something they will pay for it, VALUE is SUBJECTIVE.
Commodity-or-products have COST (cost is not value), but their VALUE depend on how much people are willing to pay for it (i.e. value is measured by price).
Consumers are dictating what is produced not the producers. Unless some "clever" guy/s decide to plan what millioins of ppl will like to have and collapse the whole thing. /sarc
You are wrong - what drives production in a capitalist economic system is the expectation of making a profit - not the meeting of human needs. The meeting of human needs, if it takes place at all, is completely incidental to the making of a profit. This is precisely what distinguishes capitalism from other, more "primitive" economic systems. If the meeting of human needs drove production, then there would not be so much desperate poverty in the world. But under capitalsim, human needs are only satisfied if the capitalist can make a profit by doing so. Consider the fact that millions of Americans today are homeless. There is a crying need for housing, millions of people are on the streets of our cities and there are lots of people ready to work and build the houses, there is no shortage of consturction workers. So, why is there such a constant shortage of housing? Because it is not sufficiently profitable for a capitalist to emoloy the workers and build the houses. And the government - at least these days - is not stepping into the breach. So, you have a society where there lots of homeless people desperate for housing and lots of construction workers desperate for employment at the same time. That is the basic problem with capitalism and why it is not a system designed to maximize the satisfaction of human needs at all. Now, do you understand why I say that it is not the meeting of human needs but the making of profit that is the motive force, the driving engine, of capitalism? In primitive societies, if you need a house, you get together with some of your neighbors and you join forces and build a house. And then you help your neighbors build their houses. And everyone in the neighborhood has a house. That is how they did it in the old west. But that was not capitalism - that was a simple form of co-operative socialism. We all pitch in and joing together to satisfy human needs. But that is not the way it is done in a modern capitalist society.
Back in the 1970’s Harvey was a mentor & took me into amazing ways of thinking & ability to shift along with his constant exploration into the depths of environment & culture
The idiocy of capitalism is the belief that people can coexist as one nation when they are waging economic warfare on each other on a daily basis.
Wow, that's the most cogent critique in a nutshell I've ever seen.
Clearly someone doesn’t know about productivity gains.
Joel Whiteside ttttt
However valuable coexisting as one nation is. Nations are agreed fictions, like money. Imagined communities, as Edward Said put it. Territorial states are real, and citizenship is always ultimately based on residency and residential birthright only, as it must be to avoid ethnic cleansing. National sovereignty (for want of a better term for the sovereignty of independent states) is necessary pending world revolution, as the precondition for democracy and popular sovereignty. That's why fake bourgeois internationalisms (by definition imperialism) like the EU, WTO and IMF have to be destroyed, because they destroy both national sovereignty and democracy.
@@patrickholt2270 I read Orientalism I would not take anything Said said with any seriousness.
Capitalism is the official state religion in the U S A - Anyone who seriously questions it is immediately denounced as either incredibly stupid or just plain wicked. Marx has been unfairly vilified for more than a century - and mostly by people who have never actually read his magnum opus, Capital, which is an enormously challenging book to actually study and understand. But it is a very profound work - it cannot be summed up in a 30 second sound-bite - and Americans are generally so poorly educated that they cannot read or understand a book that actually makes serious demands on their attention span.
Steven Yourke okay, here's a question you might wanna answer... First, WHY are you specifically making a comparison to capitalism? Every time people promote Marxism, they always criticize one specific Foe. and, on similar terms, if Capitalism is flawed, why does it have to be replaced by Communism, or Marxism. Why not something else? Why not, say, replace it with Libertariansim, or, Anarchism, or National Socialism? Why does Marxism have to be the answer?
Steven Yourke I have 2 even better questions.!st- list Marx's work history. I mean should't we at least wanna hear from the with EXPERIENCE? 2nd- Can you start communism without capitalism? If so please explain in detail 'cause in this galaxy there is no way that is possible. And for a bonus : What society has thrived with communism? And I am talking about to a level where in only a 150 years humans went from 1000s of years of horse to jet engine airplanes and it's population owning the greatest % of cars...
TheWhispervoices I don't want to replace Capitalism with Marxism. I want to change it from full free market reign as is going on in the USA. Make it into a social democracy.
***** Just wanted to let you know that you are very ignorant about the work of Karl Marx. From what you have written it is astonishingly clear to me that you have never read anything he has ever written, nor gone to a scientific lecture on him. He did not create communism as an idea, communist parties existed in Europe while Marx still was a conservative. Facism also existed before Marx, and have much more in common with mainstream politics everywhere in the world before Marx was even born (check a dictionary to see what facism really is). You think Marx deserves HATE because he criticised capitalism?! You should read Thomas Piketty to get a modern perspective on how much Marx got right. Yes, he also got stuff wrong - but that's how science works, stupid. Marx never killed anyone or exploited anyone. He was a scientist who tried to understand how capitalism worked in a time when people where suffering immensly under it (child workers dying of fatigue after 16 hours of daily work in coal mines for instance). You should not talk about subjects you CLEARLY have not been educated in.
Brian Lucas You don't understand economics if you think the US is a full free market.
I’ve encounter this matter when the entity called the government sent a notice to me concerning tax. From there I began my journey into corporate structures, legal systems to natural law, language and self-education on what this realm is fundamentally all about-it’s about the acknowledgment that we do not know anything. Which makes life a great journey, if and when you can peer with the right lens... my ego wants to be “right” but in doing so, and if the world wakes up to and went through the depression and angst I had in the last 7 years... man, it’s going to get crazy.
Moderation and staying level-headed is the most important state that people can be in, at this critical juncture in time. With proper actions built by envisioning the next 100 years would be a good step to take.
Very well said
I like what he says about housing. It's crazy that a villager in Uganda can throw up a mud hut in one week, while in the industrialised nations it takes quarter of a century to pay for a faux cave with running water and electricity piped to it. Just ridiculous, that's not progress at all.
Professor Harvey finally gets round to discussing Marx's observations on rentier privilege in response to a question. As I argue, this is the aspect of our societal challenges that require much deeper public discussion.
Professor Harvey is the master of teachers around the academic world. His explanations and correlations are monster.
Harvey at least s more true to Marx's critique than most of his British peers. Not many Marxists among Marxists these days.
I am so happy that he has no solutions. I have the only correct solution.
We need to implement the real 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'.
The real Dictatorship of the proletariat consists of two Laws that must be implemented:
1) Implement the real UBI.
2) Implement the Perpetual Limited Speed Purge Allowance (PLSPA)
@@reasonerenlightened2456 Interesting. Elaborate on the PLSPA concept?
@@MrDXRamirez
My comments are getting deleted on this page but i'll try one more time..
In short, part of the modern interpretation of the dictatorship of the proletariat is called Perpetual Limited Speed Purge Allowance (PLSPA). (One purge per person per year allowed no questions asked; the purge right is non-transferable; assistance to purge is a crime; purges can not be accumulated; nobody is excluded from being purged; self-defence rules apply when subjected to a purge attempt; all purge events must be logged in a public database; the purge can take place at any time and any place. Those are the basic rules mostly)
After the first purge wave the society will become harmonious and peaceful. ... and it will cleanse itself.
Those who want too much Power or Wealth will get purged for sure by those who don't want extreme Power or Wealth .... and the society will welcome it.
!!! The correct approach to ensure a prosperous and just society is a free market economy with corrective mechanisms working on the side in parallel and independently to compensate for the market's inherent problems (which are the creation of Extreme concentration of Wealth and Poverty at the same time i.e Empty houses and homeless people).
Those mechanisms are
1) The Real UBI (for perpetual re-distribution of Wealth),
2) The Perpetual Limited Speed Purge Allowance (PLSPA),
3) A voting system called 'Most Liked, Least Hated' gets elected. (It eliminates highly polarising candidates)
which, together, implement the true, real meaning of 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'.
!!!
@@reasonerenlightened2456 and to what again...the dissolution of social classes? Who in this paradigm promotes the productive forces of society?
@@MrDXRamirez
Classes are defined by wealth owned and power controlled. Oppression of a class, however, is a choice made by the oppressor.
Productive forces in the society are promoted by the needs of the humans with disposable Wealth/Income.
The way forward towards a better society is to increase and maintain a strong minimum purchasing power of the end-consumer using the magic formula.
(Magic Formula: 'Your minimum Purchasing Power' = 'minimum wage' + 'Benefits payments' + 'The real UBI' - 'Cost of dignified living from cradle to grave' - 'Taxes, fees, penalties')
The lecture begins a 7:35
In Covid-19 times, this is gonna accelerate
I'm still astonished that the 'authorised community' (in the academy, the media, etc) has failed over twenty years to even remotely discover the horizontalist/grassrootes/grassroutes alternative economic communites (eg here in London) that have lead to Occupy London's September 2015 adoption of the plan for Co-operative Socialism as an alternative to capitalism.
Or am I . . .
+John Courtneidge The simple answer to the naivity and incapability of the folk politics to scale up is this quote: "Goldman sachs doesn't care if you raise chickens" Read Nick Srnicek's Inventing the future.
+Jakub Ferenc would you mind expanding a bit on your comment? I think I understand the claim, but since I haven't gotten around to reading the text you recommend, I don't see the rationale behind the quote. thanks
Great talk. I think one must also consider that the rich are in a position to take more rational decisions. One must remember that a person that is trying to survive from day to day is not in a position to make strategic decisions due his more irrational or desperate existence. Perhaps we should find ways to empower rationalized thought more, so that optimal collaborative game theory can take root.
The major contradictions of capitalism are: (i) the tendency to keep wages down to increase profit but the need to have wage earners buy what is produced; and (ii) the need for never ending growth with limited resources and stagnant wages.
and I've always thought it seemed unethical and immoral to use others in desperation to make a personal profit. To benefit the company sure but not to buy the CEO another fancy yacht. That's slavery.
The failure of Marx was to recognize, as Henry George recognized, that the reasons why housing is substandard or scarce or unaffordable is because of the privatization of the rent of land. The one, most important reform of property law and taxation that was never achieved was the societal capture of land values. The result is that those who hold deeds to land enjoy an unearned (sometimes imputed sometimes realized when land is leased to actual producers) rental income stream, capitalized by market forces into higher and higher land prices over time. Speculation in land and the hoarding of land is rewarded in every society by the low effective rate of taxation on rent.
However, in societies where land is owned by the state and not offered for private development under competitive bidding conditions, the problem exists that land does not yield a fund with which to pay for public goods and services. Government is essentially forced to rely on the extraction and sale of natural resources to raise the funds to pay for production of capital goods and consumer goods.
If Marxists really want policies that will pull us toward full employment societies, pressure must be applied to achieve the fundamental changes in how societies raise revenue advanced by Henry George. This fund can then be used, if citizens democratically vote to do so, to provide a real safety net and quality social welfare services.
+Edward Dodson
The Georgist perspective has a clear geographical aspect - I wonder if the speaker knows about George.
I've heard that Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of the Labour Party in the UK, is listening to some LVTers.
+Edward Dodson "Nobody can own land, that's why you owe us a land tax." -Georgists
redbloodblackflag no, no-one should own land, therefore please cough up.
You forget the flip side of Georgism (the most important side) - no taxes on labour or capital, ie no taxes on work, no taxes on entrepreneurship, no taxes on creativity. Only one tax - on unearned wealth.
Yeah, except he covered that. You've clearly not read it.
Capitalism is somekind of permanent crisis on working class was worth appreciating from mind of David Harvey
First contradiction begins at 12:50
If top British professors have this level of humor , I wonder what could be the level of the school !!!
Very interesting and quite enlightening.
I was amused that he agreed entirely with the lady who suggested more squatting.
Quite right she was, too.
"Maybe we should go outside capitalism altogether."
This is a very good talk and people need to open their eyes. I have some simple recommendations for at least getting humanity out of the clutches of the beast called capitalism.
WHAT IS THE BEST SYSTEM: THE ONE THAT RUNS ON THE PRINCIPLE OF MODERATION
So the SYSTEM IS MODERATELY capitalist and MODERATELY socialist. This is, I think, the best starting point.
_What we need is to RECOGNISE the fundamental importance of the welfare state. It has been shown by behavioural psychologists that human beings are not rational quite a lot of the time. Therefore, to base human economics on self-interest is disastrous as this will lead the people to lose heavily if they should make wrong decisions. The fact remains that we need to provide basic minimums to all people. Beyond these minimums(house, healthcare, education, food), we need to allow some opportunity to people to profit from their talent, but not so much that 1% become the masters and the rest the slaves._
To ensure that elites are not formed we need to have *DIRECT DEMOCRACY.* People need to vote representatives out of power and laws WHENEVER they feel. So if more than 50% or 60% of the people of a country vote to repeal a law, the law is considered repealed. This follows the SWISS-styled *REFERENDUMS AND DIRECT DEMOCRACY*.
*So to have a good system we need to have SCANDINAVIAN SOCIALISM AND SWISS DIRECT DEMOCRACY as a start. Beyond this, as Professor David Harvey has suggested, the people can choose to experiment and bring changes that can be beneficial*
CHECK OUT THE STORY OF KSHAMA SAWANT AND THE 15-DOLLAR MINIMUM WAGE SHE HELPED PASS IN SEATTLE. She took no money from corporations, took only 40,000 dollars of her salary and gave the rest to social movements. You guys need to wake up and take action. You need to field independent candidates who can help pass laws that are beneficial to you.
Look, people, it is time for humanity to mature and to demand a decent life. You have been treated like children for too long, and either you realise that the way forward is to have an equal say in running the world, or you are going to remain slaves forever. So spread the
The truth is only absolute and there is no room for inconsistency.Either go ancap or ancom.You are saying that because people dont always make rational decisions a fascist govt(this includes direct democracy as it enslaves everybody to everyone which are external coercive forces) needs to set a welfare state.The point if individual freedom is that people can make mistakes and to suffer from those mistakes.
More Soviet housing required
The elite like having slaves.
What is important here is that capitalism has an alternative and that alternative can give a better life to all world not just a couple of countries
The " Unfree Market " , no thanks .
CAPITALISM - ONLY 17 CONTRADICTIONS?????
Around 1:15 he talks about the resurgence of rentier capital in our age, and the possible relevance of Ricardian economic theory.
Brilliant. Love this man...
Harvey is flat out killing the game. Let me change that, he's been killing the game for a hot minute. Kyrie Irving is the David Harvey of the NBA. Damn!
wonderful!
comintern should regroup, make pamphlets from this speech, and flood eurasia with it
I would love to see this guy get into a debate against a anarcho-capitalist or Libertarian.
15:30 describes most of the commenters who can't get past the label of Marx or socialism.
He might address it elsewhere, but in the 3 crisis contradictions (dichotomies?) he seems to skirt the possibility of a locally managed steady state economy, which would have the additional advantage of being easier for people to understand or at least grow constructive expectations (after a few years of participation) or perhaps the possibility and benefits of a well controlled dynamic 'homeostasis' between at least the production & demand sides, and also the stagnation vs speed functions of capital, in sequestration of capital (hoarding by the wealthy) and the lack of capital (predation debt by the poor) to the detriment of all.
Calling it the London School of Economics is like calling The Catholic Church the Rome School of Philosophy.
+1
Damn, Lahore school of economics seems like a great place!
I like how they ignore the fact that its isnt a free market when the government has a monopoly on the money supply
Relistening to this and ohhh man around 1:04:00
No matter how firmly the moderator insists that the audience gets to the point and not hog the mic in Q&A, there's _always_ some boomer who disregards the admonition and goes on to pontificate aimlessly
1:06:35 was pitch perfect
@@jimbodriver1015 nah, you're just being lazy and are hearing what you want to hear
Here's the problem, human labor is inefficient. machines can do most the work human labor does, and as technology progresses, more human labor jobs are lost. To get to a real alternative, work towards ending the scarcity system, utilize machines instead of human labor, and accept the fact not everyone needs to work.
Innovation and creativity, are the things machines can't do. yet. Educate and inform society, get away from the old ideas of scarcity, fighting over resources, and ignorant societies. Technocracy and resource based economies are the direction we should be headed. Human labor is becoming obsolete, and the economics based around human labor is as well.
Well, that's exactly what socialists propose. The problem with productivity gains under capitalism is that it all goes to owners of capital and not labour. Indeed, as you point out, labour is shed and wages are cut when there are increases in productivity.
If you want to make Marx as you argue him accessible, give the Man here a grant to make a cartoon/multimedia presentation of it, as they do with the TED videos.
Capitalism means "supporting an economy with bombs and heavy weapons"
The ‘State’ is defined as the institution that holds monopoly control over the use of violent force :D
bizarre to have that guy constantly beside him. Uncomfortable
Look up, "Resource Based Economics".
thank you
That is the tiniest table known to man.
We need to move away from binary thinking in order to explore alternatives. This requires a trinary model which recognises both 'sub-systems' and their constant dance of alternation, but focusses on the whole and uses dialectic method to co-discover solutions. I think this is a brave step forward...the momentum needs ot be maintained.
Can we be sure it's a displacement of crisis rather than the Emergence of a crisis as a consequence?
+Bob “Bobsiken” Olsemann cool statement, sincerely thought provoking
+Bob “Bobsiken” Olsemann cool statement, sincerely thought provoking
Exchange value system is demonstrably the best system. We have tried using use value system but you always end up with concentrated power to make decisions. Soviet Union could only calculate "use" value by copying Sears catalogues and world prices because there is no great benevolent entity that could define and communicate what the current use price for each current product and each current need is. As a result you get greater inefficiency of the producer which means you work more and get less. Also such system offers no principle in which you would define what people need and what they don't need. Exchange system discards need for want and afford which is clear to most of us. In modern economics the differentiation between exchange and use is discarded because of that. Also because the conjecture that value is always subjective seem to be true.
The problem with economics in the soviet Union was that it was controlled by bureaucrats. An efficient Marxist economic model would be one in which the economy was run democratically.
I would make the case that it would be even less efficient. As much as I understand the sentiment behind such system it fails to perform in practise. Soviet Union had at one point 15 million prices to decide upon. Bureaucrats worked hard trying to make sense what use value would be and that's why they resorted to copying exchange system prices. The problem was that those exchange prices didn't reflect the real market state in Soviet Union, hence the shortages and inefficiencies. Could you imagine a population of 300 million democratically deciding what is the use value of 15 million different products? Considering that now it is even more prices I'm going to have to resort to argument of ignorance that I cannot imagine a democratic system that would make these kinds of decisions. I would invite you to look at I, Pencil story by Leonard Read to understand how exchange system resolves these problems. I'm not saying that it is perfect but in practice it works better then any other system that has been conceived by far.
mikedd56
I agree that we shouldn't have one entity controlling the economy.I would like to see more democracy so that EVERY ONE controls the economy. Do you think there isn't red tape under private entities?
Dash Antony Look I have tried to explain long and hard why it would be inefficient to have direct democracy. Do you think it is possible to vote on 15 billion decisions? If the answer is not the not EVERY ONE controls the economy. The companies with a lot of red tape become inefficient and are eventually replaced by ones without. Ever hear of a company laying off workers because of the costs? Please do take a corse on basic economics because is seems you don't understand what inefficient means.
Zhiloreznik
This is why, price mechanism can, and should be maintained. What I am interested in is redistribution of wealth. The current system is a corporate neo-imperialism system. Most of the rich is horded by the few westerners while most of the world( non-white) are is poverty. This is unjust. The gain of trade by the winners should be returned to increase the productivity capacities of the losers so that over time, trade does lift the rest of the world out of poverty.
Took a look at the comments section. I saw mad market experts. Good.
Yes. Shelter and health are human rights, They should not primarily be a source of profit.
Ian G The only individual right is that of self ownership
The financial crisis was caused because government did away with exchange value (lowered requirements for low income people to buy homes to 0% downpayment, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae took on 50% toxic assets). The government did everything they could to get people's hands on mortgages and took on all the risks associated with them that it created a moral hazard in the market.
Haha... why doesn't the presenter sit down among the audience so the talk can get going? It just feels awkward having him sit there next to Harvey, without getting any attention anyway. Weird.
my teacher said watch esp. closely after 20 min
At twenty minutes a grey bearded fake western Marxist authoritarian pretends to be daddy.
Wow..I kinda understand why people still believe in marxism (I used to a little bit in the past); this professor seems like a nice guy to be friend with, a raw model citizen but I totally disagree with him. His conference is not about contradictions of capitalism. He just points out some flaws (which most are subjective or emotional) and anyway are coming from crony-capitalism (from state and central banks interventions) and not true capitalism where overproductions for the sake of speculations wouldn't be profitable (check out the austrian economics theory of cycle).
How do you propose to differentiate "true" capitalism from "crony" capitalism?
taojammz told that already, didn't I ?
Don't give any of the "true" shit. We live in capitalism. There is private ownership of the means of production.
Just like there isn't any "true" socialism. Which is worker ownership of the means of production. You either have one or the other.
We have the former.
Superblaster Megamaster You heard it before ? good..try to understand it ...Anyway, crony capitalism is still better than any form of communism
TLC What is your understanding of Communism?
Rackets stifle progress because they are trying to freeze things in place, and, Planned obsolescence just creates modes of consumption based on spectacle.
I have to say, I've yet to listen to a proponent of Marxism that was concise and clear in his or her arguments. Is it a requirement to be absentminded and vague when preaching Marxism?
You should try listening to Prof Richard Wolff.
definitely +Kiam Ming Chui he is excellent and you will know the history of the new deal like few else after a few months. also you do realise he was trying to explain political economy within an entirely social context, im afraid it is most likely your failure rather than harveys try taking a few notes that helps for me.
Forget Marxists and read Marx, who by the way always said he wasn't a Marxist. As paradoxical as that may sound, it speaks volumes about the ton of misinterpretations and just misrepresentations of Marx's work. His work is concise and clear. If it is voluminous, it's because despite being concise and clear, he just says so much, because there is so much to say about capitalism. So what I highly recommend is sitting down with Capital I and trudging through it: it will reveal itself to you in a grandiose fashion.
Macro-economics is very very complicated. Human society and political economy are also very very complicated. Anyone giving you a concise little fairy tale about all economics and governance amounting to balancing your import-export ratio is giving you a wholly non-representative abstraction of reality.
Actually, Volumes 2, 3, and his notebooks all remained unfinished when he died, so it's very difficult to extrapolate much of his later work. Likewise it's hard to piece all of it together because each volume uses a different framework to hilight certain aspects but which prove difficult to fit with each of the other volumes. Your statement is very true only about Capital Vol.1 and prior. Harvey's new work, after studying Marx for something like 60 years, is to fulfill an intention that Marx himself had but died short of completing, which was to resolve the extremely different pictures of political economy given in each of the 3 volumes into a cohesive and holistic Marxian value theory. The old Marx stuff isn't perfected or even complete! Please read Marx but also give Lefebvre, Harvey, and others a fair shake
17 bullet points would stop me switching off
" London School of how to destroy the Economy "
What do you mean?
@@felixlipski3956 they mean "if there is in fact a viable alternative to capitalism then I've been duped my whole life and I would not be able to come to terms with that"
🤣🤣🤣🤣
I haven't listened to the video yet but I'm guessing he leans heavily on Marx? My economic theorizing has taken me in a different direction~its very true to say there is something majorly askew about Our Market Centric Economy and in fact its so askew its leading to Cataclysmic Clashes with Nature. Even so its still rather amazing what it does do~organizes billions of people to specialize to create products and share them its very creative in a way but like an addict is creative or someone with OCD, But the law of nature is Balance in flow~ outflow and this economic machine is calibrated in its core with near complete ignorance of natures balances.We need a Scientific overhaul of Market ECO~Nomics a systems recalibration starting with the Monetary System!!
I challenge the High Priest David Harvey to answer my two questions directly on this posting. They are; 1 . Can any Marxist on here give me a system in the world that has ever worked and benefitted the poor that has NOT had capitalism and largely free trade as the predominant mechanism? and question 2. Can any Marxist give me country that has worked and lifted people out of poverty where the predominant mechanism HAS been free trade?
or anyone else if Arch Bishop Harvey cannot!
Cuba has been able to turn its meager amount of wealth into prosperity for the working class. Even more impressive, they have been able to do all of this while under the thumb of brutal economic sanctions and the collapse of the USSR!
In Cuba, 85 percent of the population owns their own homes, mortgage-free. Cubans have unrestricted access to high quality health care and a guarantee of a free public education through the university level. Cuba has universal literacy. Every Cuban is guaranteed a basic income, and a job if they can work. Cuba ranks extremely highly in terms of nutrition, childhood mortality rates, healthy birth weights, immunization, and life expectancy - all higher than the US!
Yes it is true that Cuba is still poor, but the poor in Cuba live far better than the poor in capitalist countries. At least Cuba has an excuse - the entire country is poor, so it makes sense that the people are poor. What is the US's excuse?
Elijah Redarmy If Cuba is so wonderful why do people strap themselves to flotation devices made from garbage float 90 miles in shark infested open ocean to escape it?
85% of the population lives in homes propped up by jury rigged beams as the Government restricts who can do the work to repair said buildings and how much you can spend on such repairs or improvements and will fine you or confiscate said home if you are in violation.
Free education would mean it was provided without taxation so in reality is was not "Free" and it is just a tool for indoctrination by the government brainwashing people into believing it's necessary for survival.
Only if you are a member of the communist party do you gain access to the best health care and they restrict who can join the communist party.
The reality is bureaucrats of communist nations constantly produce false data so they will not be replaced or killed.
Barskor1
They are genuine questions that I pose (I admit the bit about the High Priest is a little childish) and they do not, as far as I can see, need in-depth answers. But they have not been answered because as history shows, there aren't any countries that have lifted the general standard of living of people including the poor without large freedom of capitalism and trade.
I have read a large body of work because of my general interest in history, mainly of the USSR and watch debates like this.
To believe in something without proof of it ever existing or working you need a leap of faith. Prof. Harvey believes the writing of Marx, hence his religious title.
I am of an open mind so if you can point to any evidence it would be helpful, or any books that may show this to be the case that I am wrong and Prof. Harvey is right?
Richard Stevens Well Richard I agree with you and in my opinion Professor Harvey is a Wall Banger pseudo intellectual nut case with no clue about economics.
I will say without capitalism 90% or more of the worlds knowledge and technology simply would not exist.
sorry prof Harvey , but reading the book is a much more worthwhile exercise than watching this video .
I can shorten this entire video for everyone. He says "Socialism is great, never mind how we're going to make it work".
Around 1.23.00ish David Harvey is talking about a book by someone, who's name I'm almost definitely going to misspell (hence, my problem haha), called 'Caines' but doesn't mention the name of the book. Can anyone tell me the actual spelling of the authors name and the title of the book please?
Conor Davidson it’s Keynes as in Keynesian Economics which was the dominant economic philosophy of the ‘new deal’ in United States up until the 1970s. At that point the investor class rebelled because of extremely high taxes and the strength of the trade unions. In the 1980s neoliberal Reaganomics was born which is the polar opposite of Keynesian.
There are lot of people with nearly religious faith in one or the other but of course the most happiness and stability is found somewhere in the middle.
Neoliberalism/Austrian policies benefit the wealthy investor class Keynsian economics benefits the working and middle classes. As the speaker said, we’re stuck alternating between the two theories because either one implemented simplistically creates a situation of monopolistic stagnation/exclusion followed by revolution.
Fancy narratives, fancy phrases and lots of smoke and mirrors.
14.47- contradiction between use value and exchange value
"capitalism is ending", says marxism... almost a two centuries by now.
in effect it has ended, what we have today is not a "free market", that idea has run it's course. profit margins are synthetically managed by the 1%. the next crash is inevitable and will be the final nail in the coffin of capitalism. we have trillions in ghost capital, leveraging is at unrecoverable rates. these are not complicated facts, it's very basic economics and has already been tested in the 2007-08 crash, and nothing has changed, they are up to the same tricks that brought down the last economic crash bailed out by taxpayers... the only thing stopping it is creative new ways to squeeze capital out of 3rd world countries, there is a limit to this manipulation... when it goes this next time it will go all the way.
sure, sure... "the next one would be final one"... again, this has been said by more than the a century.
Cassiano Cosmelli example please...
you will find them in books
Cassiano Cosmelli what books?
What happens when "Growth" covers the world in Urban sprawl?
Maybe if one of these bolshies actually WORKED a day in their life, they would understand business and economics in a real way. Bolshevism...
Anarcho Capitalism is Contradiction Actually not. Again, it's obvious, much like these dusty, crusty reds, that you have no idea how business work. Business is 60/30/10 - 60% Sales, 30% Negotiation, 10% what the company does. *Maybe*, after a long run of market dominance, that 10% number can go to 20%. But never higher than that. That's why your "workers" so often get screwed. Production is just not that important. How do I know this? Because I actually ran my own business for over 9 years. SALES is king. SELL OR DIE.
TheLoyalOfficer Pfft hahaha k we won't work. We joined an Anarchist commune. What now? Oh noes Muh business! Muh Capitalism!
Anarcho Capitalism is Contradiction Who is "we"? Are you part of some dead-end hippie group?
Why do you think running a business makes you more qualified to study world economic systems? If anything, I wouldn't trust someone with a business to explain it to me. They have to justify their own position within the system, so you're sure to get a very distorted vision. It's like trusting a hypnotist on the medical applications of hypnosis, or a fox hunter about the necessity of hunting foxes in managing the local ecosystem. You'd have to be mad! Get an intelligent academic involved, like a sensible person would..
Farco Any "economic theory" of capitalism that does not address Sales and Negotiation is a joke. This is why the left fails over and over and over again economically. Marx was a good historian, but he had no clue about his own present, or the future. 60/30/10.
RBE (Resource based Economy) So far is the best alternative to economics.
+Haj Tom Says who? You? Peter Joseph?
+Haj Tom Zeitgeist movement is technocracy at best... how is that good?
+Haj Tom Economics studies means, ends values, choice, profit, loss, preference, and cost(human action). A Resource based economy will not be without human action. Study Economics.
*****
What is your point?
RonPaul Revered "This is an appeal to authority. Think for yourself." You said that, and then you didn't really prove it.
Someone should tell David Harvey that it is better to keep his mouth shut and thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
It must be a sad life for him having spent 30 years reading and theorizing on one book (Das Kapital) and at the same time knowingly ignore the obvious truth that capitalism has created the greatest nations in history.
TL;DR: An imperative, an insult and a bit of 'ideological patriotism'. Wonderful argument pal! Also... "and thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."?
Aren't you knowingly ignoring how the current form of bastardized capitalism we are heading for the worst economic collapse since the fall of Rome. Perhaps even worse than Rome. More people are going to be effected for sure.
Tenebrousable Funny, we don't have capitalism in common with Rome. What we do have in common with the fall of Rome is a central government that is inefficient and unwise with how it spends money and prints currency. Did you know that the Roman government debased their currency so much that they refused to accept it (their own currency) for payment on taxes due? If we fall like Rome it's going to be because our government is acting like Rome, e.g. quantitative easing.
I commend you for looking to history in an effort to foretell the future. However, I think you're letting your political bias get in the way of what actually happened in history. Hit the books again, and I'm sure you'll find that the most successful nations throughout history are those that have (at least somewhat) free economies. Start with Hong Kong. That's a very interesting story.
sschmalz1 Well, I agree with that comment. Seems to me you should be agreeing with David Harvey too then at least to some degree, at least enough to not think him of as a fool.
Tenebrousable Hmmm, we have some disconnect here, and I'm not sure what it is. Not sure what I could have written to lead you to believe I have anything remotely in common with this Marxist.
"compound growth cannot last"......who would've thunk (using high school math)
Such lack of charisma... ouch.
Academics have no charisma ... have you ever read academic 'literature'?
Handsome_Hero There are and have been many academics with excellent charisma.
Feel free to name any... and as a rule they and their style of writing are far from charismatic. Harvey incidentally writes far better than he speaks. But most social scientists rarely write anything worth reading.
Well we are referring to different things I think. I am referring to charismatic speaking, you're speaking about charismatic writing. In general I agree with you, the social science literature are usually not terribly interesting to read but in this case these fellows are presenting the material verbally in a way that would make some one want to hurt themselves for a distraction lol
Academic writing is rather hard to make charismatic in my experience, but it can be done with speaking and lecturing. See Richard Feynman for instance. His books are great but even he does not make the material breezy. When he speaks, however, it's fun to just listen to him. That's charism.
I didn't count 17 'contradictions'. And the supposed 'contradictions are not contradictions in any sense. How is there a contradiction between money and property. What is meant by a contradiction between production and realisation. The problem with Marxism is that its ideas are not supported by either data or experience. And there is plenty of both.
What's the alternative?
The superstructure joke is great 1:03:08
Is there a reason the Grad Center was omitted? Harvey is not only "in New York." Why denigrate one of our great public institutions?
He's hard to keep with, but that's not a critique of him, it's my own Attention Deficit.
With all its flaws it is not difficult to conclude Capitalism an abysmal failure. I suggest those who accept only a few flaws carry on reading and observing and in time must surely conclude Capitalism has been good for the ' West ' but a disaster for most people on earth and the Planet itself. I think it could be said that if you think Capitalism will solve World Poverty, Pandemics, excessive carbon emissions, looking after the weak in any society, fair distribution of wealth, pensions, education, etc perhaps it is time to have a review of ones conclusions about how mankind should live and organize a style of Government exploiting the planet with sustainable food growth and allowing most of our fellow animals to exist. Some controls and restrictions are surely necessary but of course this is against the so called "laws' of Capitalism.
I'm not saying this isn't interesting but is there ever 17 points set out?
+rossyboyiscool read the book ;*)
re 1:14:xx What is 'ronteer' (sp?) ? (? some form of rent taker?)
I would argue that Communism does not necessarily refer to or equate Marxism!:)
Longteng Jung Marxism is scientific communism
Tip: video is best at 1.25 speed
1:03:10 raises good comments about the nature of credit tbh
Dead or Red. That's the future.
Coward ?
Lecture starts at 7:45
last time ever a marxist was present at LSE
good story .. but combine it with the challenges of the internet media revolution, that gives free space for populisms that have no interest in finding a common truth, vision on reality
Question at 1:21:45 sure didn't age well! Of course, inflation is really just a lagging indicator of monopolist market power.
wait, this isn't the viper campaign
I don't know that much about Marx, so I see he shows the flaws of Capitalism is great detail, but does he provide an alternative? I don't know if communism is a debated concept on what it should look like and how it should function, but are all communist societies supposedly trying to fulfill Marxist ideals?
Chris Tully Plus, I don't know if this is just rubbish, but for someone who is earning 400 a month in a factory, and someone is earning 4 million in an office, does that mean they are literally working 10,000 times harder than the other to justify earning that much more?
Chris Tully Chris Tully well, that's a very good point: Marx wrote Capital and had a big project in mind, but never finished writing it, so we don't have a direct view of "how should society be" according to Marx. Capital is a HUGE body of work and it's just a fraction of what Marx wanted to write, so we will never know.
Communist parties have debated long and hard about what kind of world would reflect Marx's perspective, but so far they have only come up with horrible dictatorships or bureaucratic economies... and the governments that have been elected to create a socialist or communist society have been violently erased by the US (like Chile in 1973). But communists supporting dictatorships is just (for me) stupid. Communism seeks the common good, a common goal... and dictatorships are just the opposite. I'm a marxist and I stand against state and bureaucratic violence.
So yeah, Marx never proposed any "ideals", he just pointed out the problems of capitalism using a dialectical model of analysis. It's hard to get around it, because it's not the way we are used to think about authors nowadays... now, authors must promote an idea or model, or at least we expect them to provide us a thing (an alternative, a vision, a specific notion to follow or study), but Marx's work is similar to Hegel in that sense: their work is not a "thing" you can follow, it's the description of processes and how they affect or determine us. In every dialectical analysis, the process between the objects are more important and more real than the objects themselves.
A simple example of this: the concept of "class struggle" arises from the fact that there's a social exploitation we can all see in real life: people working countless hours and making barely enough money to survive, while others just own the factories or put their money in the bank and live amazing lives thanks to interests. If there's an exploitation (a process in which somebody lives at the exploitation and expenses of others), then there must be groups of people who are in a relationship of exploitation (classes). Therefore, the way to organize this tension would be to analyze the two classes participating in this process: exploiters and exploited. "Classes", for Marx, are not "rich" or "poor" (that's the notion we have today of such terms). "Classes" are just elements that you can analyze in relationship to the notion of "exploitation". Class struggle, therefore, is a way of mapping elements FROM THE PROCESS, NOT FROM THE OBJECTS.
Also, the guy earning 400 a month and the owner of the factory earning 4 million is a subject that Marx talks in depth in Capital. You might want to give this great book a shot. ;)
EduardoPavezGoye It definitely doesn't sound like a bit of light reading, more like a book for serious study and consideration. Will give it a try!
Chris Tully oh, it's serious study and consideration, that's the main reason very few people take the time and read it, and the overwhelming vast majority just repeat the myths they have read and heard about Marx, instead of study his body of work.
if you want to get into "Capital", I would highly suggest to watch David Harvey's series of lectures here on youtube about "Capital". He analyses the whole book and guides you through the process, so you won't get lost in technical details. ;)
Chris Tully I feel Marx did great work analyzing capitalism but went astray on his belief that the state will dismantle capitalism. First I will state what I feel is the main contradiction in capitalism, then what I believe the best solution is.
It is a contradiction for capital to make capital for a private individual as capital along can not produce value. All wealth comes from labor-value, combined with use-value. Contrary to what economists are now taught and what the mainstream media tell us, subjective-value only fucks with the balance. Corporations do not pay for advertising; we all do; as advertising firms make big money and consume lots of stuff other people need to make. Corporations don't pay for election campaigns, workers do. We, the workers pay for the wars and Wall street etc, etc. When the tastes of rich people propel different products upwards, this imbalance between price and real-value must be offset somewhere else, by some other commodity selling below its value. Simple laws of nature. Also, progress leads to a tendency to use labor saving technology to increase productivity, and over time the capitalist will use relatively more constant capital; which cannot be a source of surplus; which leads to a Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, which leads to repeated crisis known as boom and bust cycles. The capitalist relies on this capital; because in business, if you don't go forward, you go backward, the strong will exploit the weak. Laid of workers are simply displaced. It would be more logical to simple divide work better then to keep trying to make another useless product. This is why half the world work long hard hours for subsistence wages.
When a capitalist expresses his economic freedom he approaches on others, and economic freedom depends on how much capital you have. The more saturated global markets become; the more this becomes the case.
Participatory economics is a concrete modal for an alternative political economy to capitalism, based on economic democracy. Capital is property of the commons, along with intellectual property and resources; to be passed to the next generation as a gift. The work place is a democracy, and communities plan what the community wants. People are free to educate themselves for higher paid jobs or work longer or shorter hours if they want more material wealth, but people only get rewarded for what society deems their efforts worth. If people feel a law is silly, like many corporate driven laws are, they can simply negotiate a change. Apposing views in the negotiation process are sorted out with proposals and counter proposals that are designed to reach the middle ground that gets the highest consensus. Its a labor-value system that makes capitalism look primitive.
equality = freedom/you can not have one without the other.
"The [participatory economics] approach is a stimulating challenge to conventional thinking. It is carefully argued and the conclusions plausible and well worth considering seriously." - Noam Chomsky.
Yeah, go to "La Villa 31" in Buenos Aires, Argentina! every year is bigger...Argentina has so many social programs that people don't even need to work anymore, if they "can't" afford it, they even get free tv set so they can watch free soccer on free cable! socialism contradiction #3
Questions start around 54:50
Interesting, but does he ever tell us the 17 contradictions? Maybe he does, but it would be hard to list what the 17 are as presented. Bakunin might have had better ideas than Marx.
+John Yorks I suggest searching Larken Rose
redbloodblackflag Well, the sort of "voluntary" theory doesn't appeal to me because it seems to allow the rich too much leeway. Too much emphasis on not paying taxes, which reminds me of the Republican Party really.
+John Yorks
hmmm...the US spends more and more, in relation to the GDP but the rich are to blame for the country's monetary woes...makes sense.
when millions upon millions of Americans ( and non Americans) have multiple children they can't afford, its the wealthy who are to blame when there's no money for a new school. when the Government, in direct confliction with the law, flood the labor market with millions of illegal immigrants, its the wealthy who are to blame for stagnant wages.
yes, we oppose higher taxes because the Government has far exceeded it's constitutional authority and continues waste money at a breath taking pace. don't tell me you need more money to operate this country when billions of dollars are given away in foreign aid. half of this nation pays no federal income taxes but it's the wealthy who are the fault. nearly 70% of illegals are on public assistance, which is also against the law, I might add, but it's the wealthy who are to blame.
capital gains taxes are lower because the money's already been taxed before; its the second bite of the apple.
the left have it figured out: take all you can from the makers and support the leeches because they'll keep voting for those hand outs.
Bakunin (and Kropotkin) are excellent when it comes to the actual solutions to capitalism. Marx helps us understand and thereby undermine/attack capitalism, spreading class consciousness.
Wow so right on China seven years ago
technical point i never understood - and forgot to ask the experts, my faullt - to compare use value with exchange value one has to monetise - by which i here mean 'put a money price on' the former.
How does one do it?
Please help!
PS: (added 24 hours or so later)
Is the key not to try and compare them *quantitatively* at all? - if can't do it; that's another (too-aphoristic) way of expression the contradiction between use value and exchange value. The logical thing then is to get out capitalism altogether.
Add to this: what *is* money? even 'derivative money' - notes (bills in US-english) that used to directly represent precious metals... in the USA: until 1972... but a 20-pound note doesnt mean that any more... basically Capitalism doesnt make sense... not in the sense that pure math justifies itself primarily by aesthetics within a contradiction-free-ness paradigm (that's the ideal - so dont throw Godel at me please!)
These stupid-sounding remarks of mine are *all* addressed and answered in David Harvey's lecture if I understand it right ... very instructive speech!
Read Capital, all the answers to your questions are in the first few chapters.
LSE is a left center: Beatrice Webb, Karl Popper, David Harvey, John N. Gray, etc.
Too bad ideas.
capitalism alway lead to imperialism
Imperialism is the highest development stage of capitalism.
Communism always leads to democide.
can anyone summarize this in two pagess lol?
that is very easy lol
'Philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it'..... How?
Revolution
quote:
>>>
From this ancient beginning, Adam Smith launched his monumental work “Wealth of Nations” which was perhaps the first attempt at turning the study of man’s economy into a science. Unfortunately, by the mid 19th century, Marx began to take economics away from the course of a science and into the realm of political philosophy. Thus, economics today as taught in most universities has transgressed from a science of observation and laws into a means of social philosophy by which the question is no longer observation and study but social manipulation to effect a desired end result. Consequently, the history of economic thought is one plagued by a battle between the science of economy and the philosophy of economy for social justice.
It is important to understand that this battle between social justice and the study of the economy has resulted in economics becoming less of a science and more of a political tool to achieve a distinct purpose.
...
Today, economics faces the same crisis between those who are interested in the study of what actually makes the economy tick and those who merely pretend to be economists as a means to enforce their personal political agenda of social justice. Such beliefs in social justice belong to philosophy and not to the science of economics.
>>
In my opinion studying economics is barely scientific.
It should be in the interest of everybody profiting from capitalism that social injustice does not increase too much.
ToriZealot It should be but it isn't
Mike Armitage Because short-term profits have become the most important thing. Not really news I know ...
I'd be more for socialism if we were not attached to third world countries shoot our population projections almost entirely suggest growth through immigration. Capitalism has it's place. population growth is a major contributing factor to the dislike of socialism. We can have socialism but not in a growing world.
Man, those questions were absolutely terrible.
The first globally traded 'resource' of captured Africans provided the labour capital for the private control of cotton and sugar production. This system of capitalism is only focussed on the large generation of profits for the few and for that reason is very resistant to a changing philosophy of distributing wealth for the benefit of all. Slavery wrought capitalism, the three pillars of which are Mercantilism, Colonialism and imperialism. To get back to the more egaliatarian view of our common interests as expoused by Prof Harvey, a revolution needs to take place to rid the world of the Morgan, the Rothschilds, the Rockefeller, the Edison and the Ford system that leaves so much of this world in the vacuum of globally generated profits for the mineral poor and structural adjustment by the IMF for the mineral rich. This is the perverse foundational contradiction of the capitalist system. So whether the revolution needs to be a social democracy that allows all to come around the table of plenty on an equitable basis, or one of a dialectical materialism, it still requires a revolution or alternative to this structural capitalist system!