Full name: The Enigma of Capital: and the Crises of Capitalism

Author: David Harvey Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Amazon Goodreads ISBNs: 9780199836840 0199836841

For over forty years, David Harvey has been one of the world's most trenchant and critical analysts of capitalist development. In The Enigma of Capital, he delivers an impassioned account of how unchecked neoliberalism produced the system-wide crisis that now engulfs the world.Beginning in the 1970s, profitability pressures led the capitalist class in advanced countries to shift away from investment in industrial production at home toward the higher returns that financial products promised. Accompanying this was a shift towards privatization, an absolute decline inthe bargaining power of labor, and the dispersion of production throughout the developing world. The decades-long and ongoing decline in wages that accompanied this turn produced a dilemma: how can goods--especially real estate--sell at the same rate as before if workers are making less in relativeterms? The answer was a huge expansion of credit that fueled the explosive growth of both the financial industry and the real estate market. When one key market collapsed--real estate--the other one did as well, and social devastation resulted.Harvey places today's crisis in the broadest possible context: the historical development of global capitalism itself from the industrial era onward. Moving deftly between this history and the unfolding of the current crisis, he concentrates on how such crises both devastate workers andcreate openings for challenging the system's legitimacy. The battle now will be between the still-powerful forces that want to reconstitute the system of yesterday and those that want to replace it with one that prizes social justice and economic equality. The new afterword focuses on the continuingimpact of the crisis and the response to it in 2010. Similar books: Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streeck Postcapitalism by Paul Mason The Limits to Capital by David Harvey Saving Capitalism by Robert B. Reich 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang One Market Under God by Thomas Frank The End of the Free Market by Ian Bremmer Value, Price and Profit by Karl Marx The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood Four Futures by Peter Frase Supercapitalism by Robert B. Reich Bad Samaritans by Ha-Joon Chang Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty The Work of Nations by Robert B. Reich