Summary Of Crisis Of Capitalism By David Harvey

Over the past several decades, the functionality of capitalism has been greatly debated. In “Crisis of Capitalism,” Marxist geographer, David Harvey, takes a very strong stance against capitalism, and even claims that it never seems to solve the issues it creates. Rather, it moves the problems geographically, only offering temporary solutions that will soon become crises of their own. Unfortunately, in his RSA lecture, Harvey abruptly begins with five complex context points, or as he refers to them, “genres”: human frailty, institutional failures, obsession with failed theory, cultural origins, and failure of policy. Despite being an uncanny and unclear introduction, these points serve as general background information for his thesis; and act as refutations in Harvey’s argument, in that they are merely excuses for capitalism’s overall flaws.
In this case, “the internal contradictions of capital accumulation” is a critical concept that describes the multi-step structure of thinking about how capital moves and is moved. For example, Harvey begins in the 1970s with the issue of “excessive power of labor,” which is ‘defeated’ by capitalism via out-sourcing and offshoring. Then, with the deflation of jobs and wages, corporate profits rise exponentially. As a result, the markets are flooded with goods, but no demand, due to wage regression. So, as a ‘solution’ to this problem, consumers are offered credit, in which they can use to purchase goods, but the wages never increase. Thus, the endless cycle of “internal contradictions” is set to increase the profits of the one percent or financiers, and in-debt the working force throughout the entire history of