Book review: Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, by David Harvey
If you're sick of capitalism, here's some good news. The dogma that has become default could yet collapse in the face of growing popular loathing, according to David Harvey, a distinguished professor at the City University of New York, who highlights "episodic volcanic eruptions of popular anger",
by David Harvey
Profile Books
3.5 stars
David Wilson
If you're sick of capitalism, here's some good news. The dogma that has become default could yet collapse in the face of growing popular loathing, according to David Harvey, a distinguished professor at the City University of New York, who highlights "episodic volcanic eruptions of popular anger", in London (2011), Stockholm (2013), Istanbul (2013) and a hundred Brazilian cities (2013).
"The discontent … does not simply focus on the technical failings of capital to deliver on its promises of a consumer paradise and employment for all, but increasingly objects to the degrading consequences for anyone and everyone who has to submit to the dehumanising social rules and codes that capital and an increasingly autocratic capitalist state dictate," writes Harvey, 78.
His thrust is that capitalism strives to accumulate capital to an insane degree, deploying the cheapest cost-cutting production methods. Consequently, poorly paid workers lack the means to keep fuelling consumption. Nonetheless, rampant development continues, driving nature towards extinction.
Worse still, according to the anthropologist, those combined tensions bolster mass unemployment, fuelling the decline of Europe and Japan yet buoying China's unsure stabs at progress.
To Harvey, capitalism is worse than dysfunctional - dystopian - and should be scrapped for all the cited reasons, compounded with another overarching one: the abysmal inequality it spawns in countries including China.