Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (44 page)

Contradiction 3: Private Property and the Capitalist State

1.
Silvio Gesell,
The Natural Economic Order
(1916);
http:www.archive.org/details/TheNaturalEconomicOrder
, p. 81.

2.
David Harvey,
The Enigma of Capital
, London, Profile Books, 2010, pp. 55–7.

3.
Thomas Greco,
The End of Money and the Future of Civilization
, White River Junction, VT, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009.

4.
Ibid.

Contradiction 4: Private Appropriation and Common Wealth

1.
Karl Marx,
Grundrisse
, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973, p. 223.

2.
Karl Polanyi,
The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
, Boston, Beacon Press, 1957, p. 72.

3.
Ibid., p. 73.

4.
Ibid., p. 178.

5.
Martin Heidegger,
Discourse on Thinking
, New York, Harper Press, 1966, p. 50.

Contradiction 5: Capital and Labour

1.
Karl Marx,
Capital
, Volume 1, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973, p. 344.

2.
Andrew Glyn and Robert Sutcliffe,
British Capitalism: Workers and the Profit Squeeze
, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972.

Contradiction 6: Capital as Process or Thing?

1.
John Maynard Keynes,
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1964, p. 376.

Contradiction 7: The Contradictory Unity of Production and Realisation

1.
Karl Marx,
Capital
, Volume 2, Harmondsworth, Pelican Books, 1978, p. 391. The parallel passage in Volume 1 is to be found on p. 799 of the Penguin edition.

Part Two: The Moving Contradictions

1.
W. Brian Arthur,
The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves
, New York, Free Press, 2009, p. 202.

Contradiction 8: Technology, Work and Human Disposability

1.
W. Brian Arthur,
The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves
, New York, Free Press, 2009, pp. 22 et seq.

2.
Jane Jacobs,
The Economy of Cities
, New York, Vintage, 1969.

3.
Arthur,
The Nature of Technology
, p. 211.

4.
Alfred NorthWhitehead,
Process and Reality
, New York, Free Press, 1969, p. 33.

5.
Arthur,
The Nature of Technology
, p. 213; Karl Marx,
Grundrisse
, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973.

6.
Arthur,
The Nature of Technology
, p 191.

7.
Joseph Schumpeter,
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
, London, Routledge, 1942, pp. 82–3.

8.
Arthur,
The Nature of Technology
, p. 186.

9.
André Gorz,
Critique of Economic Reason
, London, Verso, 1989, p. 200.

10.
Martin Ford,
The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Acclerating Technology and the Economy of the Future
, USA, Acculant
^TM
Publishing, 2009, p. 62.

11.
Ibid., pp. 96–7.

12.
Gorz,
Critique of Economic Reason
, p. 92.

13.
Melissa Wright,
Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism
, New York, Routledge, 2006.

Contradiction 9: Divisions of Labour

1.
Harry Braverman,
Labor and Monopoly Capital
, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1974.

2.
Timothy Mitchell,
The Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity
, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002.

3.
Robert Reich,
The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism
, New York, Vintage, 1992.

4.
Karl Marx,
Capital
, Volume 1, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973, p. 618.

Contradiction 10: Monopoly and Competition: Centralisation and Decentralisation

1.
Joseph Stiglitz,
The Price of Inequality
, New York, Norton, 2013, p. 44.

2.
Ibid.

3.
Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy,
Monopoly Capitalism
, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1966.

4.
Giovanni Arrighi, ‘Towards a Theory of Capitalist Crisis’,
New Left Review
, September 1978.

5.
Elisée Reclus,
Anarchy, Geography, Modernity
, edited by John P. Clark and Camille Martin, Oxford, Lexington Books, 2004, p. 124.

6.
David Harvey, ‘The Art of Rent’, in
Spaces of Capital
, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2002.

7.
Alfred Chandler,
The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1993.

8.
Giovanni Arrighi,
Adam Smith in Beijing
, London, Verso, 2010.

9.
Karl Marx,
Capital
, Volume 3, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981, p. 490.

Contradiction 11: Uneven Geographical Developments and the Production of Space

1.
Gunnar Myrdal,
Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions
, London, Duckworth, 1957.

2.
David Harvey,
Spaces of Capital
, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2002.

3.
Henri Lefebvre,
The Production of Space
, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Contradiction 12: Disparities of Income and Wealth

1.
Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, ‘Building a Better America – One Wealth Quintile at a Time’,
Perspectives on Psychological Science
, Vol. 6, 2011, p. 9.

2.
Oxfam, ‘The Cost of Inequality: How Wealth and Income Extremes Hurt Us All’,
Oxfam Media Briefing
, 18 January 2013.

3.
Branko Milanovic,
Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality
, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005, p. 149.

4.
Craig Calhoun, ‘What Threatens Capitalism Now?’, in Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian and
Craig Calhoun,
Does Capitalism Have a Future?
, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013.

Contradiction 13: Social Reproduction

1.
Cited in Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, ‘The Problem with Human Capital Theory: A Marxian Critique’,
American Economic Review
, Vol. 65, No. 2, 1975, pp. 74–82.

2.
Karl Marx,
Capital
, Volume 3, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981, pp. 503–5.

3.
Gary Becker,
Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education
, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994.

4.
Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, in J. Richardson (ed.),
Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education
, New York, Greenwood, 1986.

5.
Robert Reich,
The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism
, New York, Vintage, 1992.

6.
Cindi Katz, ‘Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction’,
Antipode
, Vol. 33, No. 4, 2001, pp. 709–28.

7.
Jürgen Habermas,
The Theory of Communicative Action. Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason
, Boston, Beacon Press, 1985; Henri Lefebvre,
Critique of Everyday Life
, London, Verso, 1991.

8.
Fernand Braudel,
Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800
, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973.

9.
Randy Martin,
Financialization of Daily Life
, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2002.

10.
Katz, ‘Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction’, pp. 709–28.

11.
Lefebvre,
Critique of Everyday Life
.

Contradiction 14: Freedom and Domination

1.
Christopher Hill,
The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution
, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1984.

2.
Terry Eagleton,
Why Marx Was Right
, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2011, p. 87.

3.
I provide an overview of all of George W. Bush’s speeches in David Harvey,
Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom
, New York, Columbia University Press, 2009, pp. 1–14.

4.
Michel Foucault,
The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979
, New York, Picador, 2008.

5.
Robert Wolff, Barrington Moore and Herbert Marcuse,
A Critique of Pure Tolerance: Beyond Tolerance, Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook, Repressive Tolerance
, Boston, Beacon Press, 1969.

6.
Karl Polanyi,
The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
, Boston, Beacon Press, 1957, pp. 256–7.

7.
Ibid., p. 257.

8.
Ibid., p. 258.

9.
Amartya Sen,
Development as Freedom
, New York, Anchor Books, 2000, pp. 297–8.

10.
Peter Buffett, ‘The Charitable-Industrial Complex’,
New York Times
, 26 July 2013.

11.
Karl Marx,
Grundrisse
, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973, p. 488.

12.
Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, in
Karl Marx: Early Texts
, edited by David McLellan, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1972.

13.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
The Social Contract
, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008.

14.
Eagleton,
Why Marx Was Right
, pp. 75–6.

Contradiction 15: Endless Compound Growth

1.
Michael Hudson,
The Bubble and Beyond
, Dresden, Islet, 2012. This is one of the only economics texts I know that takes the issue of compound growth seriously. I have used some of his materials in what follows. When I raised the question of compound growth in 2011 with two senior economics editors of a major global newspaper, one of them shrugged off the question as trivial if not laughable, while the other said there were still plenty of new technological frontiers to explore so why worry.

2.
Robert Gordon, ‘Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds’,
Working Paper 18315
, Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2012. The public reaction to
Gordon’s arguments are covered in Thomas Edsall, ‘No More Industrial Revolutions’,
New York Times
, 15 October 2012. The general public reaction was that Gordon probably had a point but that he was too pessimistic on the future impact of innovations. Martin Wolf, an influential economist with the
Financial Times
, however, accepted much of what Gordon had to say and concluded that economic elites in the high-income world would welcome the future that Gordon described but everyone else would like it ‘vastly less. Get used to this. It will not change.’ Other contributions would be Tyler Cowen,
The Great Stagnation: How America Ate all the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick and Will (Eventually) Feel Better
, E-special from Dutton, 2011. All these arguments are, however, US-focused.

3.
The Thelluson case is described in Hudson,
The Bubble and Beyond
.

4.
Cited in Karl Marx,
Capital
, Volume 3, Harmondsworth, Penguin, p. 519.

5.
Angus Maddison,
Phases of Capitalist Development
, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982;
Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD
, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007.

6.
Bradford DeLong, ‘Estimating World GDP, One Million B.C.–Present’. Estimates given in Wikipedia entry on Gross World Product.

7.
Thomas Malthus,
An Essay on the Principle of Population
, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

8.
McKinsey Global Institute, ‘The World at Work: Jobs, Pay and Skills for 3.5 Billion People’,
Report of the McKinsey Global Institute
, 2012.

9.
Guy Debord,
The Society of the Spectacle
, Kalamazoo, Black & Red, 2000.

10.
Alvin Toffler,
The Third Wave: The Classic Study of Tomorrow
, New York, Bantam, 1980.

11.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
Commonwealth
, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2009.

12.
Antonio Gramsci,
The Prison Notebooks
, London, NLR Books, 1971.

13.
Gordon, ‘Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds’.

14.
Marx,
Capital
, Volume 3, p. 573.

15.
I provided a synoptic account of this in David Harvey,
A Brief History of Neoliberalism
, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005.

Contradiction 16: Capital’s Relation to Nature

1.
Paul Sabin,
The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future
, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013.

2.
I argue this case in detail in David Harvey,
Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference
, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1996.

3.
Neil Smith, ‘Nature as Accumulation Strategy’,
Socialist Register
, 2007, pp. 19–41.

4.
Arthur McEvoy,
The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980
, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

5.
Arne Naess,
Ecology, Community and Lifestyle
, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989; William Leiss,
The Domination of Nature
, Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 1974; Martin Jay,
The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–50
, Boston, MA, Beacon Press, 1973; Murray Bookchin,
The Philosophy of Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism
, Montreal, Black Rose Books, 1990; Richard Peet, Paul Robbins and Michael Watts,
Global Political Ecology
, New York, Routledge, 2011; John Bellamy Foster,
Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature
, New York, Monthly Review Press, 2000.