The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles

David Harvey

Description

Amidst waves of economic crises, health crises, class struggle and neo-fascist reaction, few possess the clarity and foresight of world-renowned theorist, David Harvey. Since the publication of his bestselling A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey has been tracking the evolution of the capitalist system as well as tides of radical opposition rising against it. In The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles, Harvey introduces new ways of understanding the crisis of global capitalism and the struggles for a better world.

While accounting for violence and disaster, Harvey also chronicles hope and possibility. By way of conversations about neoliberalism, capitalism, globalization, the environment, technology, social movements and crises like COVID-19, he outlines, with characteristic brilliance, how socialist alternatives are being imagined under very difficult circumstances.

In understanding the economic, political and social dimensions of the crisis, Harvey’s analysis in The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles will be of strategic importance to anyone wanting to both understand and change the world.

Preface - Jordan T. Camp

Editors’ Note - Jordan T. Camp and Chris Caruso

Author’s Note - David Harvey

Acknowledgements

1. Global Unrest

2. A Brief History of Neoliberalism

3. Contradictions of Neoliberalism

4. The Financialization of Power

5. The Authoritarian Turn

6. Socialism and Freedom

7. The Significance of China in the World Economy

8. The Geopolitics of Capitalism

9. The Growth Syndrome

10. The Erosion of Consumer Choices

11. Primitive or Original Accumulation

12. Accumulation by Dispossession

13. Production and Realization

14. Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Climate Change

15. Rate versus Mass of Surplus Value

16. Alienation

17. Alienation at Work: The Politics of a Plant Closure

18. Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19

19. The Collective Response to a Collective Dilemma

Discussion Questions and Further Readings

Index

Sujets

• Economic Policy
• Public Policy
• International Relations
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• 21st century
• Primitive accumulation of capital
• Geopolitics
• General officer
• Political economy
• Macroeconomics
• Economics
• Capitalism
• Business
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786807755
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles
Red Letter
Chief Editor
Jordan T. Camp (Visiting Scholar, Center for Place, Culture and Politics, City University of New York, Graduate Center; Co-Director, Racial Capitalism Working Group in the Center for Social Difference at Columbia University)
Editorial Board
Christina Heatherton (Assistant Professor, American Studies, Barnard College; Co-Director, Racial Capitalism Working Group in the Center for Social Difference at Columbia University)
Manu Karuka (Assistant Professor, American Studies, Barnard College; Co-Director, Racial Capitalism Working Group in the Center for Social Difference at Columbia University)
Advisory Board
Elisabeth Armstrong (Professor, Program for the Study of Women Gender, Smith College)
Claudia de la Cruz (Executive Director, The People s Forum)
Jodi Dean (Professor, Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges)
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (Professor Emerita, Department of Ethnic Studies, California State University, Hayward)
Kanishka Goonewardena (Associate Professor, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto)
Gerald Horne (Moores Professor of History and African American Studies, University of Houston)
Gary Y. Okihiro (Professor Emeritus of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University)
Vijay Prashad (Director, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)
The Red Letter series is developed in and launched from The People s Forum, a movement incubator and educational space in New York City. It features innovative studies in the history of capitalism, imperialism, social movements, and social theory. Red Letter books link engaged scholarly production and radical working-class movements in North America from an internationalist perspective. Inspired by Antonio Gramsci, Red Letter works with authors who are committed to advancing the struggles of the poor, working class, the unemployed, and the dispossessed, the new intellectuals of our time.
The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles
David Harvey
Edited by Jordan T. Camp and Chris Caruso
First published 2020 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright David Harvey 2020
The right of David Harvey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4208 5 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4209 2 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0774 8 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0776 2 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0775 5 EPUB eBook
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
Contents
Preface
Jordan T. Camp
Editors Note
Jordan T. Camp and Chris Caruso
Author s Note
David Harvey
Acknowledgements
1. Global Unrest
2. A Brief History of Neoliberalism
3. Contradictions of Neoliberalism
4. The Financialization of Power
5. The Authoritarian Turn
6. Socialism and Freedom
7. The Significance of China in the World Economy
8. The Geopolitics of Capitalism
9. The Growth Syndrome
10. The Erosion of Consumer Choices
11. Primitive or Original Accumulation
12. Accumulation by Dispossession
13. Production and Realization
14. Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Climate Change
15. Rate versus Mass of Surplus Value
16. Alienation
17. Alienation at Work: The Politics of a Plant Closure
18. Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19
19. The Collective Response to a Collective Dilemma
Discussion Questions and Further Readings
Index
Preface
Jordan T. Camp
With The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles , my co-editors, Christina Heatherton and Manu Karuka, and I are immensely proud to launch our Red Letter book series. Red Letter features works by intellectuals invested in the struggles of the poor, working class, and dispossessed in North America from an internationalist perspective. Inspired by Antonio Gramsci, we publish works by emerging radical intellectuals, authors, scholars, and permanent persuaders of political and social movements. Amidst a surging interest in socialism, our books are intended as resources for popular education in working-class and socialist movements, as well as for classroom adoption. Our goal is to place anti-imperialism and class struggle at the heart of the political and intellectual agenda.
The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles was conceived as an intervention in debates around the crisis of neoliberal capitalism and the renewal of the socialist left. It was developed through discussions at The People s Forum, a movement incubator and educational and cultural space in New York City. In this endeavor we have been fortunate to interact with political and social movements across the United States and Global South including the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil; South Africa s Abahlali baseMjondolo, the shack-dweller s movement and the National Union of Metalworkers South Africa (NUMSA); and the Poor People s Campaign, Fight for 15, anti-war movements in North America, and many more. In these struggles, we see new visions for fundamental social change arising. We are immensely proud to work in collaboration with some of the foremost Marxist scholars in the United States and in the world, namely, David Harvey.
Few possess the clarity and foresight of world-renowned Marxist theorist, David Harvey. Since the publication of his bestselling A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), Harvey has been tracking the evolution of the neoliberal capitalism as well as tides of radical opposition rising against it. Now, amidst waves of economic crisis, class struggle, and neo-fascist reaction, Harvey defines how socialist alternatives to capitalism are possible, and elucidates how the transition to socialism can and must be organized by the movements. The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles represents Harvey s reflections on crisis and possibility, an update and clear-eyed assessment of the intervening years since A Brief History of Neoliberalism was first published.
While some works declare neoliberalism dead, The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles contends that the neoliberal project is very much alive, but, significantly, with its legitimacy lost. Neoliberalism, unable to command the consent it once did, has developed alliances with neo-fascism in order to survive. The rise of nationalist and violent reactionary forces is therefore not ancillary or accidental to the survival of capitalism; as Harvey argues, such violence has been present since its bloody inception. 1 In A Brief History , Harvey argued that the CIA-backed coup in Chile in 1973 marked a critical moment in the turn to neoliberalism. At the time, US President Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to make the economy scream in Chile in order to prevent democratically elected socialist, Salvador Allende from coming to power. Democratic forces were violently repressed by military force. In our present moment of US-backed coups in Latin America, US support for the far right, and the repression of left political movements in the hemisphere, Harvey s insights are critical to understand the evolution of the neoliberal state, and indeed, the struggle before us. 2
Then, as now, the rise of the neoliberal state is inconceivable outside of class struggles across the US and the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, national liberation and socialist struggles circulated across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. These struggles were linked to an expanding geography of urban insurgencies in North America and Europe. Anti-imperialist struggles in places like Vietnam, as I have argued, were concretely linked to uprisings in places like Watts in 1965 and Detroit in 1967. Taken together, these struggles led to a crisis of hegemony for capital and the state. The political response of state and capitalist forces to this crisis produced a new historical and geographical conjuncture. The rise of neoliberalism cannot be understood outside of this global context of insurgency. 3
In this period, as A Brief History of Neoliberalism describes, the interests of the ruling class were shown to be disconnected from the interests of the masses. Increased expenditures on warfare and militarism, such as mass incarceration and policing, contributed to neoliberalism s legitimacy crisis. In order to resolve this crisis, capitalist states promoted authoritarian politics and free market solutions. It is from these efforts that we can mark the neoliberal turn. This global neoliberal counterrevolution, we should remember, was the product of political and class struggles; ones that could have had, and that still could have, different outcomes. 4
The development of the neoliberal state has been accompanied by the production of a historically specific common sense. Harvey employs the concept of common sense as Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci did, to describe the generally held assumptions and beliefs that secure consent to coercion. 5 Common sense obscures the sources of political and economic problems through culturalist and nationalist narratives about race, gender, sexuality, religion, the family, freedom, corruption, and law and order. These narratives have been mobilized to secure consent to what Harvey describes as the restoration of class power. Harvey argues that political questions are difficult to answer when they are concealed as cultural narratives. Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, for instance, represented an environmental catastrophe that required state organized evacuation plans, the deployment of emergency public health measures, and the distribution of food and medicine. This