Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

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Oxford University Press, 7 mar 2014 - 288 páginas
"What I am seeking here is a better understanding of the contradictions of capital, not of capitalism. I want to know how the economic engine of capitalism works the way it does, and why it might stutter and stall and sometimes appear to be on the verge of collapse. I also want to show why this economic engine should be replaced, and with what." --from the Introduction To modern Western society, capitalism is the air we breathe, and most people rarely think to question it, for good or for ill. But knowing what makes capitalism work--and what makes it fail--is crucial to understanding its long-term health, and the vast implications for the global economy that go along with it. In Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, the eminent scholar David Harvey, author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism, examines the internal contradictions within the flow of capital that have precipitated recent crises. He contends that while the contradictions have made capitalism flexible and resilient, they also contain the seeds of systemic catastrophe. Many of the contradictions are manageable, but some are fatal: the stress on endless compound growth, the necessity to exploit nature to its limits, and tendency toward universal alienation. Capitalism has always managed to extend the outer limits through "spatial fixes," expanding the geography of the system to cover nations and people formerly outside of its range. Whether it can continue to expand is an open question, but Harvey thinks it unlikely in the medium term future: the limits cannot extend much further, and the recent financial crisis is a harbinger of this. David Harvey has long been recognized as one of the world's most acute critical analysts of the global capitalist system and the injustices that flow from it. In this book, he returns to the foundations of all of his work, dissecting and interrogating the fundamental illogic of our economic system, as well as giving us a look at how human societies are likely to evolve in a post-capitalist world.
 

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Índice

Prologue The Crisis of Capitalism This Time Around
Introduction On Contradiction
The Foundational Contradictions
Use Value and Exchange Value
The Social Value of Labour and Its Representation by Money
Private Property and the Capitalist State
Private Appropriation and Common Wealth
Capital and Labour
Centralisation and Decentralisation
Uneven Geographical Developments and the Production of Space
Disparities of Income and Wealth
Social Reproduction
Freedom and Domination
The Dangerous Contradictions
Endless Compound Growth
Capitals Relation to Nature

Capital as Process or Thing?
The Contradictory Unity of Production and Realisation
The Moving Contradictions
Technology Work and Human Disposability
Divisions of Labour
Universal Alienation
The Promise of Revolutionary Humanism
Epilogue
Bibliography and Further Reading
13

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Sobre el autor (2014)

David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is among the top twenty most cited authors in the humanities and is the world's most cited academic geographer. His books include The Limits to Capital, Social Justice and the City, and The Condition of Postmodernity, among many others.

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