'Visualizing Capital' with Professor David Harvey 

This is revelatory, even after having watched many of Prof. Harvey's lectures all the way through multiple times. He is absolutely brilliant and his explanation of economics has literally changed my life and how I see the world.

its a real shame that more people are not watching this

As a Japanese geographer and 4D-mapper and archivist, who read Marx's Capital from volume 1 to volume 3 throughly 40 years ago in Japanese, I have realized old maps in an unified coordinate system- CAD-Globe, with 3D- aerial photos,as historical reality, to visualize economical and political status as land administration system, imaging capitalism growth. So I would like to learn Visualizing Capital.

this really is wildly interesting, especially near the end when he talks about noble policy goals that can be hijacked if other parts of the system arent addressed. I wish there was a way to make people sit through this and watch it all

"Debt is anti-value; it's a foreclosure on the future. If the debt is not redeemed then the value is lost. Capital is mobilizing anti-value right now to promote the necessity of producing value." In other words, as far as I can tell...the more debt people have the harder they have to work to pay off that debt, and the harder they work the more they produce. Even if their wages are high they have to work harder to pay off their debts, and debt is being normalized through credit cards and the like so that people don't see it as "bad" to have debt, especially not with the credit system giving you a score based on how you handle debt; if you don't have any history of debt then your score is worse than if you do, and if you have a lot of debt that you pay off your score is better than if you have very little debt that you pay off, and with a lower score (a zero because of no debt is worse than a bad credit rating) it's harder to participate in the economy via loans for cars, houses, businesses etc. Without debt you don't have a stockmarket (which is people paying money for the right to be given more money later), you don't have people who make fortunes off of stock market gambling becoming super rich, you don't have banks investing your savings account money giving your account a % return, and on and on. Debt has become so ubiquitous and normal that it really does "promote the necessity of producing value" by driving the expansion of value production in order to keep the system from collapsing. This was a great lecture. Definitely worth saving for later.

great stuff

How come this video doesn't has a million likes? (not a manufactured want, need or desire).

This was awesome talk. Especially the last part where prof. Harvey talked about wages. We can see how that can be manipulated. If a government passes a bill on higher wages then e.g. your IT provider can charge you higher price for consumer services. At that point that wage increase did absolutely nothing. Maybe this is part of the claim that capitalism is structural oppression. Getting out of it will be very difficult. Thanks for the upload though.

Co-operation is a human universal. The people who don't co-operate within one structure co-operate within another. The people who isolate themselves from others are rear and die early.

David harvey is a genius

Very interesting work by David Harvey. It's good that he chose the water cycle as a comparison. In fact, the capitalist system isn't that different. Both systems get energy from the sun. Of course, capitalism also gets energy from fossil fuels, there is a great variety of materials flowing through the system, and capital itself is partly an abstract construction of social relations. The water cycle is much simpler, it gets all it's energy from the sun, and all you need to keep a look at is H2O. Both systems have elements of matter which create a cyclical factor, and elements of energy which create an "arrow" factor. Energy is not cyclical, and the sun constantly inputs energy into our planet, making life possible. Neil Faulkner explains history as simultaneous cycles and arrows, and this approach can be applied here as well. Cycles and arrows together form spirals, so both the water cycle and capitalism are actually spiral systems. The spiral nature of history has actually been acknowledged in Marxism for a long time. However, "spiralling out of control" is a dubious statement, because capitalism is both planned and spontaneous at the same time. It can't exist without one or the other. Just look at U.S. imperialism, constantly planning for where to plunder next. What we simply need to do now is to take the spiral to the next level, establish global communism which means democratically planned resource-based economy. To achieve that, we should be fighting the bourgeoisie, not just sitting around in lecture halls.

Does anyone have a link to a high resolution image of the capital cycle? The only one I can find online is Verso's, but it is very small

There is great work that has been done by Marxist economist and Modern Monetary theorist Michael Hudson in "Killing the Host" and "J is for Junk Economics", that intricately describes the role that finance plays in destroying the capitalist system.

I have a plan to translate Alexander von Humboldt's KOSMOS as a classic of Natural History, evolution theory and ecology and environmental studies.

mind blowing....

This is a real mind expander

The notion of debt peonage is critical. Mainstream economists miss this because they do not care for debt and credit ("One person's debt is another person's asset" as per Paul Krugman). They also miss this because debt is more of a social, rather than a market, relationship, and most economists come profoundly unequipped to comprehend the social aspects of the economy. Economists also do not study history, otherwise they will probably realize that the current "innovative" economic system is not really that new or innovative. Credit based economies existed thousands of years ago and were usually surrounded by a system of debtor protection, or, resulted in social struggles and violence (forgot the historian's name, but there was one who said that all revolts in ancient history had 1 agenda: cancel the debts and redistribute the land). Currently, our system has the exactly opposite nature: instead of protecting debtors from predatory practices that reduce them to slavery and debt peonage, we have global bureaucratic systems that protect creditors by insisting, and enforcing (emphasis on forcing) rules that demand that debtors repay debts by all means necessary. Examples: World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc. These are not my ideas, I'm paraphrasing David Graeber's book on Debt. A must read in the 21st century.

For geography join minnat campus

The entire system could be crashed by not consuming and not producing?

>David Harvey complains that Marx gets misrepresented by many Marxists >While he misrepresents Marx frequently himself (e.g. his rejection of Marx' LTRPF-based crisis theory,) Nonetheless, I appreciate his effort to visualize Marx's theories.

Ez 30 minute video. 2x speed

Lol, whose man is this? somebody help him make a better visualisation.