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+--- Thread: Marx's comeback among young intellectuals - David Harvey, expositor (/thread-226.html)
Marx's comeback among young intellectuals - David Harvey, expositor - C C - Nov 5, 2014
"...fixing inequality will take more than tinkering..."
http://chronicle.com/article/Mapping-a-New-Economy/146433/
EXCERPT: David Harvey would implore you to imagine life without capitalism—that is, if you can. Chances are, even if you’re puzzled by the manipulation of phantom money on Wall Street, troubled by society’s growing inequality, or disgusted with the platinum parachutes of corporate executives, you probably still conceive the world in terms of profits, private property, and free markets, the invisible hand always on the tiller.
[...] Capitalism can survive its contradictions, he writes, as long as it heaps more burdens—in the form of class inequality, degradation of the environment, and curtailing of human freedom—on the people and institutions already holding it up.
[...] At some point, he believes, the system can’t continue. [...] he raises the specter of violence as a potential response to the inequities of capital—the riots and protests in Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, and Sweden last year "look more and more like the prior tremors for a coming earthquake that will make the postcolonial revolutionary struggles of the 1960s look like child’s play."
"The longer it goes on," Harvey says quietly in his New York office, "the less I think that there is a possibility that it will be a peaceful transition."
[...] the supercharged capitalist culture of the United States, being a Marxist intellectual—even, according to Thomson Reuters, as one of the most frequently cited academics in the world—means often being overlooked in the public square. While Harvey draws big crowds and mainstream news media during appearances in Europe and South America, in this country his name appears mainly in small leftist outlets. "I get on the BBC, but I don’t get on NPR," he says. "There is a kind of taboo in the mainstream media of taking any of this seriously."
Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism may be the book that introduces Harvey to a wider audience. After all, it lands at an auspicious moment....