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…
