The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of CapitalismFor over forty years, David Harvey has been one of the world's most trenchant and critical analysts of capitalist development. In The Enigma of Capital, he delivers an impassioned account of how unchecked neoliberalism produced the system-wide crisis that now engulfs the world. Beginning in the 1970s, profitability pressures led the capitalist class in advanced countries to shift away from investment in industrial production at home toward the higher returns that financial products promised. Accompanying this was a shift towards privatization, an absolute decline in the bargaining power of labor, and the dispersion of production throughout the developing world. The decades-long and ongoing decline in wages that accompanied this turn produced a dilemma: how can goods--especially real estate--sell at the same rate as before if workers are making less in relative terms? The answer was a huge expansion of credit that fueled the explosive growth of both the financial industry and the real estate market. When one key market collapsed--real estate--the other one did as well, and social devastation resulted. Harvey places today's crisis in the broadest possible context: the historical development of global capitalism itself from the industrial era onward. Moving deftly between this history and the unfolding of the current crisis, he concentrates on how such crises both devastate workers and create openings for challenging the system's legitimacy. The battle now will be between the still-powerful forces that want to reconstitute the system of yesterday and those that want to replace it with one that prizes social justice and economic equality. The new afterword focuses on the continuing impact of the crisis and the response to it in 2010. One of Huffington Post's Best Social and Political Awareness Books of 2010 Winner of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize for 2010 Praise for the Hardcover: "A lucid and penetrating account of how the power of capital shapes our world." --Andrew Gamble, Independent "Elegant... entertainingly swashbuckling... Harvey's analysis is interesting not only for the breadth of his scholarship but his recognition of the system's strengths." --John Gapper, Financial Times |
From inside the book
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Page 6
... asia was contracting at an alarming rate (many countries like Taiwan, China, South Korea and Japan saw their exports falling by 20 per cent or more in just two months). Global international trade fell by a third in a few months creating ...
... asia was contracting at an alarming rate (many countries like Taiwan, China, South Korea and Japan saw their exports falling by 20 per cent or more in just two months). Global international trade fell by a third in a few months creating ...
Page 8
... asia in 1997–8 was excessive urban development, fuelled by an inflow of foreign speculative capital, in Thailand, hong Kong, indonesia, South Korea and the Philippines. and the long-drawn-out commercial-propertyled savings and loan ...
... asia in 1997–8 was excessive urban development, fuelled by an inflow of foreign speculative capital, in Thailand, hong Kong, indonesia, South Korea and the Philippines. and the long-drawn-out commercial-propertyled savings and loan ...
Page 27
... Asia 363 1,387 3,099 5,401 14,884 4.36 3.83 Africa 203 550 905 1,322 2,937 2.96 3.00 'REST' 2,148 6,624 12,117 20,648 61,460 4.19 4.12 WORLD 5,341 16,022 27,136 40,913 96,580 3.21 3.23 actual compound rate of growth has been close to ...
... Asia 363 1,387 3,099 5,401 14,884 4.36 3.83 Africa 203 550 905 1,322 2,937 2.96 3.00 'REST' 2,148 6,624 12,117 20,648 61,460 4.19 4.12 WORLD 5,341 16,022 27,136 40,913 96,580 3.21 3.23 actual compound rate of growth has been close to ...
Page 28
... asia as well as much of india and the Middle East, Latin america and significant areas of africa. The task of keeping capitalism going at this compound rate is nothing if not daunting. But why does 3 per cent growth presuppose 3 per ...
... asia as well as much of india and the Middle East, Latin america and significant areas of africa. The task of keeping capitalism going at this compound rate is nothing if not daunting. But why does 3 per cent growth presuppose 3 per ...
Page 30
... asia and Latin america, have yet to be fully colonised by capital accumulation). The turn to financialisation since 1973 was one born of necessity. it offered a way of dealing with the surplus absorption problem. But where was the ...
... asia and Latin america, have yet to be fully colonised by capital accumulation). The turn to financialisation since 1973 was one born of necessity. it offered a way of dealing with the surplus absorption problem. But where was the ...
Contents
1 | |
2 Capital Assembled | 40 |
3 Capital Goes to Work | 58 |
4 Capital Goes to Market | 106 |
5 Capital Evolves | 119 |
6 The Geography of It All | 140 |
7 Creative destruction on the Land | 184 |
8 What is to be Done? And Who is Going to Do It? | 215 |
Appendices | 261 |
Sources and Further Reading | 263 |
Index | 268 |
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Common terms and phrases
accumulation by dispossession anti-capitalist asia asset values banks barriers become billion capital accumulation capital surplus capital surplus absorption capitalist capitalist class capitalist development cent centres China circulation co-evolution commodity communism communist competition compound rate construction corporate create creative destruction crises crisis cultural daily debt dispossession dominant dynamics economic effective demand environmental example factory global happened housing huge human industrial infrastructures innovation investment labour power labour process land Marx Marx’s ment mental conceptions mobilised money power movement Mumbai neoliberal organisational forms particular peak oil Pearl river delta Péreire brothers perpetual political populations potential problem profit radical egalitarianism regions reinvest relation to nature revolutionary rise role sectors social relations sort South Korea space spatial state–finance nexus struggle surplus capital technologies and organisational territorial theory tion trade trillion uneven geographical development United urban urbanisation wage Wall Street wealth workers