( – promoted by buhdydharma )
Sociologist David Harvey, Professor in the Graduate Centre of City University of New York, asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that really could be responsible, just, and humane?
Harvey’s influential books include The New Imperialism; Paris, Capital of Modernity; Social Justice and the City; Limits to Capital; The Urbanization of Capital; The Condition of Postmodernity; Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference; Spaces of Hope; and Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography.
This narrated animation is based on a lecture, “The Crises of Capitalism”, given by Professor Harvey in April this year at the RSA. For over 250 years the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has been a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress.
Radical sociologist Professor David Harvey visits the RSA to explain how capitalism came to dominate the world and why it resulted in the current financial crisis.
Taking a long view of the current crisis, Professor Harvey exposes the follies of the international financial system, looking closely at the nature of capitalism, how it works and why sometimes it doesn’t.
Examining the cycles of boom and bust in the world’s housing and stock markets, and the vast flows of money that surge round the world daily, Harvey shows that periodic episodes of meltdown are not only inevitable in the capitalist system but, in fact, are essential to its survival. Harvey argues that the essence of capitalism is its amorality and lawlessness and to talk of a regulated, ethical capitalism is to make a fundamental error.
Can crises of the current sort be contained within the constraints of capitalism? Or is it time to make the case for a social order that would allow us to live within a different type of system – one that really could be responsible, just, and humane?
“Capitalism never solves its crisis problems.”
“It moves them around geographically.”
The narrated animation above is an abbreviated version of David Harvey’s 30 minute talk, here:
…about 30 minutes…
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Who is this nut?
to actually see someone speaking clearly and directly.
we must organize around the gulf now.
this is all i care about as a fulcrum for change.
we must reach the gulf coast people who do not understand what has hit them.
…that TPTB were allowed to turn the words Marxism, Socialism, Communism into frightening, terrifying bogey men when they should be seen as benefit to the growth of humankind (and animalkind).
Author
How’s life?
since, unless a time limit has been pre-determined, the game technically ends when one player has managed to bankrupt all the others.
Maybe Monopoly is just a game, however, we are forced to play it for real with the large multi-nationals. We are placed at further disadvantage since any and all disputes decided by their evil Siamese twin, those governmental arbiters whose have sold their souls to their corporate masters.
But perhaps more accurately, we reside in a dual system, one of socialism for the wealthy and unfettered capitalism for the rest of us.
world, armed to the teeth and searching for ways to support the artificial “system”, there does not appear to be the theological underpinnings that have been relied on in past crises to legitimize the structual hierarchies in our civilization. You know, like everyone should know their place bullshit. They try to use God, but even the Teabaggers have given up on that as their primary argument.
Are we left only with descriptions created by the loudest voices glorifying some non-existing reality that glorifies some non-existing history? Is man now truly left to himself to define his limits, highlighted by the likes of the CNBC money talk shows? Are we threatened with power totally severed from philosophy and morality, that understanding justice is only available in the context of uncontrolled access to wealth? Is this the apotheosis of Rationalism, unrestrained by even principles of democracy, an existential quagmire of survival of the fittest?
IMHO, this follows the intent of our founding fathers in their Declaration of Independence exactly 234 years ago today. They (artfully using the pronoun we)wanted simply to be masters of their own “colonies”. The masses didn’t count then and they don’t count now. And the only way to guarantee control is to make people feel terror, go to war regulary, and make the military the most necessary institution. Our Indian wars lasted over 100 years and were fairly quickly replaced by the wars against labor and socialism (up till this day).
I believed de Tocqueville observed that the regime de la terreur was the perfect methodology to make the masses familiar with the realities created by the elite.