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A Movable Contradiction: David Harvey and Capitalism’s Multiple Crisis Points
I must admit to a soft spot for David Harvey. He was one of the first capitalism-skeptics I came across after the crisis, so I read “The Enigma of Capital” (2010) and then “Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capital” (2014) in hardcover and reviewed them favorably on Amazon. I even got him to follow me on Twitter somehow. I do not think he is the one who controls the account, but I am still going to use this space to brag about David Harvey following me on Twitter. I revisited Harvey in my readings recently, and it excited me. It also was a chance to watch his interviews, and then I found that there were a lot of David Harvey interviews on YouTube, so I watched several back-to-back and my wife came home to find me in a trance to his Kentish accent.
One thing about Harvey that I have found over the years is that he tries to be very precise in his language. This makes him prolix, a trait that I can identify with. For years, I had one of his quotes as the header for my personal blog and Facebook pages: “We are, in fact, surrounded with dangerously oversimplistic monocausal explanations.” This is was an anchor for me as I try to understand the dynamics of the economic system that we live in. As students we are often taught to think of linear causes to processes — a form of “first this, then that.” I like to boil Harvey down to the idea that “It’s more complicated than that!” My current header quote is “There is only one true answer to any economic question: “It depends”,” from Dani Rodrik. These two quotes illustrate my personal take-away from over a decade of studying the economy that everything is complicated and conditional in a dynamic process.
Which is to say that Harvey’s conceptions of multiple points of failure for the capitalistic system really resonates with me. From his interviews and writings since the crisis, the big takeaway from Harvey is not that capitalism is broken. Of course, it is broken. The very concept of the business cycle, where there is growth and then suddenly not growth in spite of the same people in the world should show that it is broken, but we’ve been looking at the business cycle as a thing for over two centuries and those who question the very system that creates those cycles are people on the fringe of the discipline because there’s…
