Downloads:
.PDF.
David Harvey’s Companion:
Marxist Economics
A Microeconomic Reconstruction of Marx’s Labour Market Theory
Marx, the Declining Rate of Profit, and British Political Economy
Marx on the English Agricultural Revolution: Theory and Evidence
Marx’s Falling Rate of Profit: A Dialectical View
On Marx’s Theory of Unemployment
Primitive Globalization? State and Locale in Neoliberal Global Engagement
Rates of Profit and Interregional Flows of Capital
The Rationality of Empowerment: Microcredit, Accumulation by Dispossession, and the Gendered Economy
Re-Structuring in U.S. Manufacturing: The Decline of Monopoly Capital
Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa
Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy
Replaced the old links and added a couple pdfs I thought were relevant.
You are the absolute best!!!
"
Does Kickstarter work? Sure! Does it fund amazing projects? Yes! Should you use it? Absolutely! Will it change the way culture is produced? No. It wont. And even imaging it could assumes a massive descaling of cultural employment. Would we even want that?
Now, you might believe that this is merely a temporary situation, that Kickstarter and similar sites can grow and grow until they can reach a similar scale to capital funded culture, but that is not possible. Why? Because “Spiderman 2″ is funded from accumulated capital, while Kickstarter is funded from the retained earnings of workers. This is a rather important difference.
What it means is that the limits of the amounts of funding available for each model are a function of the structure of wealth in society. The total pool of accumulated capital vs the total amount of retained earnings workers are able to consistently divert from consumption. The former is orders of magnitude larger than the later. In fact, the workings of the labour market will tend to push the later towards 0.
For projects like Kickstarter to scale they can not depend on the limited funds workers are able to divert from consumption, and must tap into the real source of accumulation: Surplus Value. In other words, only when money available for Kickstarter investment can be reproduced from the captured profits of the works they fund. To achieve that, Kickstarter would need to become not much different than the industry as it exists today.
"- Dimitri Kleiner on the limits of Kickstarter (via dropouthangoutspaceout)
Capitalism doesn’t have a solution for poverty because it creates the conditions for poverty to exist as a necessity for it to function on the backs of a working class.
I disagree with you.
The limited amount of resources on the planet leads to the fact that even if we just took that whole pool of resources and divided by the number of people and gave them their equal share, no one would have enough.
No one.
So, to get around extinction we allocate resources based on the amount of work you do to harvest your own resources or in conjunction with others. In an ideal capitalist society the rich would be rich because they worked the hardest, and the smartest. You should reap what you sow.
Being born on this planet doesn’t entitle you to anything. No one said evolution, survival, or life would be fair. Resource allocation is our biggest problem as a species, but equal shares just doesn’t work.
Think about what would happen if every person on Earth was “entitled” or “born into” owning a set portion of radioactive material. That wouldn’t be good, it would be abused, and in places that might not have the same level of education as other places might end up hurting themselves or their children merely through exposure to their entitlement. Not everyone should have access to everything. Specialization, especially in the handling of particular resources, is what has continued to elevate civilization from the beginning of the barter system.
Some should have more and some don’t need as much. That is an individual decision for each person to make about how much they want to work to get what they want. Only the individual decides how far they are willing to go. But that doesn’t mean they are entitled to choose to have an equal share or slightly less than an equal share. Sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, and sometimes nuclear engineers need more plutonium than you do because they have to use it to make power for your whole town.
Now, all of that should not imply that socio-economic barriers between classes should be airtight or limiting. The barriers should be proportional to the resources of the society and the amount of work their overall economy requires to continue to expand and gain resources when compared to the average standard of living. That would give you a baseline level of wealth to the lowest level of work, then the entire economy builds up from there.
The current socio-economic climate in America is not ideal. I acknowledge that. However, that climate is not generated simply by a dedication to capitalism. It has been generated by the lack of supervision that capitalism requires in order to temper the rampant self-interest it brings with it. When you let banks run wild, bankrupt companies give out bonuses, and fail to track political donations, both corporate and private, this is what you have to expect.
But that isn’t all. The feeling of entitlement generated by the overextension of social programs has led to the general feeling in America that purely by having a government we should enjoy the benefits of a functioning health care system, public education, and housing. But it doesn’t.
Instituting a government with the goal of attaining these things doesn’t entitle a nation to them. The work that goes into creating and maintaing a functioning participatory government is what provides these entitlements. They aren’t even civil rights. They are the benefits of a working government; health care, housing, and education is what your government can do for you, once you do work for your government.
So at the end of the day a functioning distribution of resources proportional to individual effort, maintained by government supervision supervised by representatives who truly represent their populace who feel that hard work should return a fair return, would not only gain resources for the hardest working, but also support the lower classes by providing the government with funds and the efficiency to ease their burden and elevate everyone. There is a reason that even the very poor in America are not suffering to the same degree as many 3rd world countries, that reason is because for a long time our capitalist system operated fairly efficiently.
I’m neither republican or democrat. I believe that capitalism can operate well, but only when we do our best to make selfishness manifest itself through hard work. I believe that a functioning government is the key to easing the cons of capitalism. I believe that a functioning government is possible, and something to love and strive for. I believe that when people think harder about which economic structure they support than which reaction gif to use the world will be filled with a more meaningful dialogue. Finally, I believe that even if you don’t agree with me, it is still in my best interest to learn and discuss with you what I might miss. Cooperation isn’t destroyed by capitalism, it is encouraged when paired with a governmental system that demands cooperation in order to operate.
Mac is perfect.
(via kyaryarchy)
The New Inquiry: American Saints
Remember how I was pondering the American fetishization of entrepreneurs a couple weeks ago? The New Inquiry, as always, got my back.
The entrepreneur alsofits into a very particular version of America’s history, bridging that past with the future of the world. America, this story goes, was built, ruled, and dominated by WASP elites, who combined the protestant ethic of frugality and hard work with a sense of their grave responsibility to lead the nation and give to the less fortunate, racism, anti-semitism, and sexism in such old boy networks notwithstanding. The entrepreneur today inherits this legacy, suitably updated for a world of information flows enabled by Google and Facebook in which racial inequality, gender discrimination, and national disparities do not matter nearly as much as they did earlier. He is willing to work long hours at low pay, motivated not so much by the IPO or the thought of his start-up being acquired by Microsoft as by the desire of doing good for America and the entire world (and for its own sake). But he respects the profit motive and is profoundly aware that shareholders, investors, and stakeholders need to see returns on their investments. And he is sustained by similar networks, entry to which, it is believed, rests on merit alone.
Can someone explain the small business fetishism that seems to permeate American politics?
What gives?
"This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner—state or private power—but coded figures—deformable and transformable—of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt."
-
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1990)
because stunningly timely
(via realchrisk)
“You see control can never be a means to any practical end. … Control can never be a means to anything but more control … like Junk.”
- William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
(via hookedonsemiotics)
I really ought to read more Deleuze. And by more I mean some, as I have not read any of his work before.
I might watch this because it looks fucking hilarious(ly bad).
The whole thing (48:12):
http://www.paradiseoroblivion.com/watch.html
David Harvey, Rebel Cities
There you have it, kids. The “Tragedy of the Commons” is—say it with me—privatization!
(via lukesimcoe)
