Rebels on the Street: The Party of Wall Street Meets its Nemesis
David Harvey Verso Books Blog
October 28, 2011
The Party of Wall Street has ruled unchallenged in the United States for far too long. It has totally (as opposed to partially) dominated the policies of Presidents over at least four decades (if not longer), no matter whether individual Presidents have been its willing agents or not. It has legally corrupted Congress via the craven dependency of politicians in both political parties upon its raw money power and upon access to the mainstream media that it controls. Thanks to the appointments made and approved by Presidents and Congress, the Party of Wall Street dominates much of the state apparatus as well as the judiciary, in particular the Supreme Court, whose partisan judgments increasingly favor venal money interests, in spheres as diverse as electoral, labor, environmental and contract law.
The Party of Wall Street has one universal principle of rule: that there shall be no serious challenge to the absolute power of money to rule absolutely. And that power is to be exercised with one objective. Those possessed of money power shall not only be privileged to accumulate wealth endlessly at will, but they shall have the right to inherit the earth, taking either direct or indirect dominion not only of the land and all the resources and productive capacities that reside therein, but also assume absolute command, directly or indirectly, over the labor and creative potentialities of all those others it needs. The rest of humanity shall be deemed disposable. Continue Reading »
Do you have a few minutes to spare to help make the Capital lectures available to speakers of languages other than English? We are making good progress in the Capital Lectures Transcription and Translation Project. We are now focused on correcting the English transcription of the first five lectures. To help, go to this site and choose one of the first five lectures. Watch the lecture in YouTube with closed captions turned on (just click the CC button in the lower right of the window), and correct any errors you find on our wiki.
After this is complete, volunteer translators will begin translating the subtitles into other languages. We already have volunteers ready to begin translating into Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Persian, Slovene, and Spanish. We just need a little help making sure we have an accurate English transcript for them to work with.
Wednesday, November 9th 2011 Walking with the Comrades The Center for Place Culture and Politics Presents
A reading by Arundhati Roy
Followed by a discussion with David Harvey
The Proshansky Auditorium
CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Ave at 34th Street
New York | 7:00–9:00 pm
Free and open to the public
Wednesday, November 30, 2011 The End of Capitalism?
Dr. S.T. Lee Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities
Penn Humanities Forum
Harrison Auditorium, Penn Museum, 3260 South Street
Philadelphia | 5:00-6:30 pm
Free and open to the public. Pre-registration required.
In an article in the New York Times on 5 February 2011, entitled ‘Housing Bubbles Are Few and Far Between’, Robert Shiller, the economist who many consider the great housing expert given his role in the construction of the Case-Shiller index of housing prices in the United States, reassured everyone that the recent housing bubble was a ‘rare event, not to be repeated for many decades’. The ‘enormous housing bubble’ of the early 2000s ‘isn’t comparable to any national or international housing cycle in history. Previous bubbles have been smaller and more regional’. The only reasonable parallels, he asserted, were the land bubbles that occurred in the United States way back in the late 1830s and the 1850s. This is, as I shall show, an astonishingly inaccurate reading of capitalist history. The fact that it passed so unremarked testifies to a serious blind spot in contemporary economic thinking. Unfortunately, it also turns out to be an equally blind spot in Marxist political economy.
Property market booms and busts are inextricably intertwined with speculative financial flows and these booms and busts have serious consequences for the macro-economy in general as well as all manner of externality effects upon resource depletion and environmental degradation. Property booms and capitalist crises also refocus politics on the city as a terrain of anti-capitalist struggle. The history of urban struggles, from the Paris Commune through the Shanghai Commune, the Seattle General Strike, The Tucuman uprising and the Prague Spring to the more general urban-based movements of 1968 (which we now see faintly echoed in Cairo and Madison) is stunning. But it is a history that is also troubled by political and tactical complications that have led many on the left to underestimate and misunderstand the potential and the potency of urban-based movements, to often see them as separate from class struggle and therefore devoid of revolutionary potential. And when such events do take on iconic status, as in the case of the Paris Commune, they are typically claimed as one of ‘the greatest proletarian uprisings’ in world history, even as they were as much about reclaiming the right to the city as they were about revolutionizing class relations in production.
Feral Capitalism Hits the Streets
by David Harvey
11 August 2011
“Nihilistic and feral teenagers” the Daily Mail called them: the crazy youths from all walks of life who raced around the streets mindlessly and desperately hurling bricks, stones and bottles at the cops while looting here and setting bonfires there, leading the authorities on a merry chase of catch-as-catch-can as they tweeted their way from one strategic target to another.
The word “feral” pulled me up short. It reminded me of how the communards in Paris in 1871 were depicted as wild animals, as hyenas, that deserved to be (and often were) summarily executed in the name of the sanctity of private property, morality, religion, and the family. But then the word conjured up another association: Tony Blair attacking the “feral media,” having for so long been comfortably lodged in the left pocket of Rupert Murdoch only later to be substituted as Murdoch reached into his right pocket to pluck out David Cameron. Continue Reading »
This video shows David Harvey speaking atop Federal Hill overlooking Baltimore’s Inner Harbor at the opening event of the City From Below conference in March 2009. In this talk, Professor Harvey revisits and updates his famous essay A View from Federal Hill, which appeared in The Baltimore Book and was reprinted in Spaces of Capital. The conference was organized by the Baltimore Development Cooperative, Red Emma’s bookstore, and the Indypendent Reader.
A close reading of the text of Karl Marx's Capital Volume I in 13 video lectures by David Harvey. Start here
David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, and author of numerous books. He has been teaching Karl Marx's Capital for nearly 40 years. Read his CV.
@chrislhayes @mattpulver I'm interested, but in Argentina on sabbatical this semester. I will be back in NYC a few times in November, though 1 week ago
