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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  • I love your presentation. The ideas are easily absorbed and one takews pleasure in the lesson. However - perhaps the only way we can curb the worst excesses of capitalism is to find credit HARDER to get, demand minimum levels of public good on all economic and government functions, re-define the corporate entity, and establish of culture of repair and personal fabricating ability.

  • Mr. Harvey, please READ Hayek as today's crisis has NOTHING to do with capitalism.

  • So have the post-Keynesians, such as Steve Keen. I believe the lecture also mentioned Minsky and financial instability. I would argue that nearly every single socialist economist forecast the financial crisis, because socialists state that crisis is a fundemental aspect of capiatlism. International capitalism has fallen into crisis in the 1880-90's (The Great Depression before The Great Depression), the 1920-30's (The Great Depression), the 1970-80's (stagflation), and now in 2008-10 (the Global Finacial Crisis). That's every 30-40 years! You could say we were due for a new one.

  • One of the aspects that is only slightly mentioned, but not made explicit in this video, and is of vital importance (and not merely because it highlights the limitations of Marxist theory for a contemporary, non-Industrial Age world) is the rift that has occurred between finance and capital. Essentially, because money has transcended into the cyber world, finance can "manufacture money" (or at least its contemporary incarnation) without requiring the messy business of true capitalism (concentration of resource, production, profit, repeat).

    I absolutely agree that a new mode of thinking is required, about which I've written on my blog: http://whatisthemessage.blogsp...

  • I, too, say "different than"!