At 8:30 he's referring to a bit of data he often brings up, to the effect that China produced roughly half again more concrete in the last few years than the US had in the entire previous century. He uses this to illustrate what compound growth really means and to suggest that we are bound to encounter hard physical limits on it immediately, if not sooner.
15:30 very important point, leading up to, ok let's go storm the Federal Reserve, but then what would we do once we got inside? This is not only about conflict among factions of the capital class, although that's part of it. It's also about constant tensions, friction as it were, among phases of the capital circulation and accumulation process. To make sense of this, recall that capital is not a thing but a process-- "value in motion" is professor Harvey's favorite term for it. Within this process, capital takes on different forms: money, commodity, production. It's constantly undergoing conversions between forms, analogous to phase transitions, and at these points, you look for tensions and contradictions, and that's where you find them. These tensions may take the external form of apparent struggles among individual capitalists or corporations or industries, but underneath, they come from stresses that are built right into the system. I think this is the general background that illuminates his point here.
The had-enoughism cannot bring forth change because it is not radical enough. Even Professor Harvey, it seems to me, is focused on looking for solutions to the mess of Capitalism. His talk of mental conceptions is one way of avoiding and commodifying Marx. To me, the exact way of honoring Marx is to leave to his project: down with the state, down with money & down with economy..& vive la commune
Ya he is a reformist- he was even trying to give Corbyn the imperialist a left cover. As if Labour was going to implement the lies they spew prior to an election! Social democracy died as a socialist movement on Aug. 4 1914 when they voted for war credits on Germany starting WW1. He also sounds like a Marxist at times- no inconsistency there as Stalinists Maisto and Social Democrats are all bourgeois nationalists, not internationalists. All socialists know that a prerequisite for socialism is the abolition of the nation state system. Have you heard of the Socialist Equality Party? Wsws.org
11:15 he notes that the big banks are already appropriating blockchain technology and using it to their own advantage. Elsewhere he mentions other technologies such as the internet that were supposed to offer a democratizing challenge to institutions of entrenched power, but capital has a way of capturing such threats and using them to consolidate and extend its own power. What you're saying is true, as far as it goes: the new technology renders old technology obsolete, and along with it, any institutions based on the old technology. So yes, banks as we knew them are over. They're transforming, and really this is just the latest in a long series of transformations. Banks as they are today would be unrecognizable to someone from a hundred years ago. But this isn't an overthrow of power. The same colossal investors still control the newly mutated financial institutions. It's kind of like saying that the internet renders the phone company or the newspaper obsolete-- ok, it does, so capital takes over the internet. It's true that some point, an accumulation of changes in technology and forms of social organization do result in a revolution in power relations, as in the transition from feudalism to Capitalism. That will happen again, or is happening. Blockchain will be a piece of that puzzle, but I suspect that in the meantime, it's just another revolutionary technology that capital uses to its advantage. Didn't mean to go on so long, but your comment prompted me to think out loud, so thanks.
