great animation: why capitalism sucks and why we're screwed

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Re: great animation: why capitalism sucks and why we're screwed

Postby vanlose kid » Tue Aug 31, 2010 1:02 pm

if anyone's interested D Harvey's offering a free course close reading of Vol. I of Marx's Capital at his site:

"David Harvey has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital, Volume I for nearly 40 years, and his lectures are now available online for the first time. This open course consists of 13 video lectures of Professor Harvey’s close chapter by chapter reading of Capital, Volume I.

The text for this course is Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx. The page numbers Professor Harvey refers to are valid for both the Penguin Classics and Vintage Books editions of Capital. Help finding the text."

start here:

http://davidharvey.org/2008/06/getting-started/

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Re: great animation: why capitalism sucks and why we're screwed

Postby matrixdutch » Tue Aug 31, 2010 5:26 pm

Wow, thanks vanlose!
Our truth consists of illusions that we have forgotten are illusions - Nietzsche
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Re: great animation: why capitalism sucks and why we're screwed

Postby vanlose kid » Wed Sep 01, 2010 12:32 am

matrixdutch wrote:Wow, thanks vanlose!


yeah, wow! you're welcome.

while it's still there, Harvey on HardTalk. -- "Capitalism will never fail on its own, it will have to be pushed. The accumulation of capitali will never cease, it will have to be stopped. Capital class will never surrender its power, it will have to be dispossessed."





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Re: great animation: why capitalism sucks and why we're screwed

Postby vanlose kid » Wed Sep 01, 2010 1:05 am

yeah, dialectics...



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Re: great animation: why capitalism sucks and why we're screwed

Postby stefano » Fri Sep 10, 2010 2:16 pm

I finished Harvey's The enigma of capital in the week and have to say I was a bit disappointed. It's a Marxist review of the world economy after the crisis, which should have been good, but I felt he's stuck on classical ideas of the economy as production, trade and investment and pays far too little attention to money creation and the massive markets in intangible 'assets'. The final chapter is pretty good, a sort of new Communist Manifesto, but overall I thought Enigma is too shallow for a student of the subject, and too dry (his style is ponderous in the extreme) for a general interest reader.

Another book I finished recently, and which I would recommend instead of Harvey's, is Harry Shutt's Beyond the Profits System: Possibilities for a Post-Capitalist Era. It's nice and short, he doesn't fall into the trap of mistaking larceny for systemic characteristics and calls out collustion (although I think it's neither wholly one or the other), he switches easily into sociology or mass psychology when it's appropriate, and his plan of action is more realistic.

Since 2008, we have found ourselves confronted by an historic financial holocaust that world leaders have struggled to come to terms with. All have willfully ignored its long-term, systemic causes and are thus unable to chart a way to survival. As explained by Harry Shutt – who was almost alone in foreseeing such a disaster in the 1990s (in The Trouble with Capitalism) – their continued denial stems from a vested interest in maintaining a capitalist profits system which is not only as destructive as it was in the 1930s but as outmoded as feudalism was in 1789. Thus it can now only be sustained by an increasing reliance to official misinformation, massive criminal fraud and the ever greater dependence of private corporations on state subsidy.

This book makes clear why the desperate resort of Western governments to 'extraordinary measures' to try and avert economic collapse is bound to fail. It also forcefully demonstrates why our only hope of reversing the tide is to abandon the traditional economic logic of endlessly expanding production in favour of responding to the aspirations of ordinary people. Such a transformation, argues Shutt, would make possible the allocation of resources to more socially desirable ends, including the assurance of basic economic security for all as a right of citizenship.
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Re: great animation: why capitalism sucks and why we're scre

Postby vanlose kid » Tue Sep 14, 2010 11:49 pm

stefano wrote:I finished Harvey's The enigma of capital in the week and have to say I was a bit disappointed. It's a Marxist review of the world economy after the crisis, which should have been good, but I felt he's stuck on classical ideas of the economy as production, trade and investment and pays far too little attention to money creation and the massive markets in intangible 'assets'. The final chapter is pretty good, a sort of new Communist Manifesto, but overall I thought Enigma is too shallow for a student of the subject, and too dry (his style is ponderous in the extreme) for a general interest reader...

[/i]


actually, i'd say he does, concisely and very well, in chapters one to five, but mainly four and five. the credit system is based on the "production of commodity money" as capital with which one either consumes or invests, thereby producing further profit, i.e. money again is put into circulation as capital, and so on.

chapters six and seven spell out the consequences, or the "expression" of that creation and circulation in human terms.

personally, though, i found it neither shallow nor dry.

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here's an absurdist run-down of the credit creation system:



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