RSA Animate – Crisis of Capitalism

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  • Social enterprise
  • Behaviour change

In this short RSA Animate, radical sociologist David Harvey asks if it is time to look beyond capitalism, towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that could be responsible, just and humane. View his full lecture at the RSA. Download a transcript of this video (pdf).

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  • Why aren't all of the people who "predicted the crisis" extremely rich? Some people got very rich after the crisis but I don't think they were Marxists.

  • At least, we do say that we fucked up. Capitalism's token apology (cuz that's what it is full of- tokenism) is still awaited. Anyway, and i think this evocation to repression as a frozen attribute of capitalism is not only naive, but unintelligent. The world has changed and is changing - and any alternative, more egalitarian system that will replace capitalism will be aware of these flaws.

  • Credit Crunch solution. Cooperative banking (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperat....

    Long story short, it's a bank structured like franchises. The banks are owned locally, per city, and collectively join together under one brand. The CEO's are democratically chosen. The obvious side affect is that the bonus culture is eradicated because the local owners will not stand for someone else taking there money. Because the bank is owned locally, the profits will flow back into the local area, which has the ability to flourish local economics. This system also makes it impossible for CEO's to hollow out large companies from the inside, behind a facade.

    If you were too look at the micro economy of the Netherlands, which housed a few large banks, like ABN AMBRO and FORTIS. Only one bank survived the economic crisis without a bailout. And that was the RABOBANK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... a cooperative bank. Now mind you that the largest part of it's business was mortgages. Thats pretty impressive.

  • Mike your absolutely right and something needs to be done about it. There are far to many individuals who have a vested interest in our so called government and good for the people, while in reality they are just our for themselves. If you are going to go into the government do it for the greater good of the people not to make yourself and your children well off for the rest of your lives while sacrificing the greater good of the people.

  • funny Harvey was a geographer, but last I heard was professor emeritus of anthropology. Most human geographers now are so caught up in post-modernist BS that they like to try to forget about him. No wonder everyone thinks he's either a sociologist or political scientist.