David Harvey: The Enigma of Capital And the Crises of Capitalism (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, economy, financial crisis, labour, market, peak oil, politics
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 in the 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 relative terms? 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 and create 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.
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2010
ISBN 0199758719, 9780199758715
296 pages
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Amber Hickey (ed.): A Guidebook of Alternative Nows (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, art, capitalism, economics, economy, education, finance, financial crisis, occupy movement, social movements
A Guidebook of Alternative Nows is a collaboratively created book.
34 visionary creative thinkers and makers contributed to this book which illuminates ways of devising more socially, economically, and ecologically just versions of now.
Contributors: Alex Kemman (The Valreep Collective), Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, Artist Bailout Collective, Billy Mark, Cheyenna Weber (SolidarityNYC), Antonio Scarponi (Conceptual Devices), Critical Art Ensemble, Ethan Miller, Fallen Fruit (David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young), Georg Hobmeier and Tommy Noonan, Howling Mob Society, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Jenny Cameron, Johannes Grenzfurthner (Monochrom), Marc Herbst and Christina Ulke (Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Editorial Collective), Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, Ken Ehrlich and Kate Johnston, Llano Del Rio Collective, New Social Art School, Platform, Rori Knudtson (School of Critical Engagement), Santiago Cirugeda (Recetas Urbanas), Sasha Costanza-Chock, SPURSE, swearonourfriendship, T.J. Demos, Temporary Services, The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, Precarious Workers Brigade, The Vacuum Cleaner, The Yes Men, TradeSchool.coop, UrbanFarmers, Watts House Project.
Publisher The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2012
ISBN 978-0-615-64972-6
266 pages
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Limn, 0-2: Prototyping Prototyping / Systemic Risk / Crowds and Clouds (2010-2012)
Filed under magazine | Tags: · big data, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data mining, economy, financial crisis, internet, networks, politics, social media, surveillance
Limn, 0: Prototyping Prototyping, Nov 2010
“Before there was LIMN, there were several different prototypes. The first was occasioned by a conference: on prototypes. Held in Madrid in November of 2010, and organized by Adolpho Estalella and Alberto Corsín Jimenez, it was a conference for which this issue was imagined as a kind of pre-conference publication–another riff on the prototype. Many of the problems LIMN seeks to address were worked out in part through this conference and the publication: from the use of new media, to the function of conferences and conference papers, to the idea of a publication that precedes or determines a social event. Issue Number Zero was very much a prototype, and bears the traces of that concept and the discussion of it by the generous participants.”
Contributors: George Marcus, Marilyn Strathern, James Leach, Alberto Corsin Jimenez and Adolfo Estalella, Alex Wilkie, Nerea Calvillo, Javier Lezaun, Lucy Suchman, Lina Dib, Michael Guggenheim, Alain Pottage
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Limn, 1: Systemic Risk, Jan 2011
“Systemic risk has become a central topic of expert discussion and political debate amidst the financial crisis that began in 2008, but it also has resonances across many other domains in which catastrophic threats loom – including internet security, supply chain management, catastrophe insurance, and critical infrastructure protection. In this issue, we invited scholars to contribute genealogical and conceptual framings that inform critical inquiry into this increasingly important concept. The result is not a traditional collection of academic articles but a set of brief, preliminary reflections, prepared on short notice, that address a common set of questions, along with a handful of documents, links, images and videos that illustrate different aspects of the concept.”
Contributors: Benjamin Sims, Deborah Cowen, Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, Christopher M. Kelty, Philip Bougen, Stephen J. Collier, Andrew Lakoff, Onur Ozgöde, Douglas R. Holmes, Rebecca Lemov, Brian Lindseth, Martha Poon, Grahame Thompson
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Limn, 2: Crowds and Clouds, Mar 2012
“This issue of LIMN focuses on new social media, data mining and surveillance, crowdsourcing, cloud computing, big data, and Internet revolutions. Rather than follow the well-worn paths of argument typical today, our contributors address the problems in new ways and at odd angles: from the power and politics of statistics and algorithms to crowdsourcing’s discontents to the capriciousness of collectives in an election; from the focus group and the casino to the worlds of micro-finance and data-intensive policing. Together they raise questions about the relationship of technology and the collectives that form in and through them.”
Contributors: Christopher Kelty, Alain Desrosières, Lilly Irani, Chris Csikszentmihályi, Gabriella Coleman, Nick Seaver, Emmanuel Didier, Alek Felstiner, Tarleton Gillespie, Roma Jhaveri, Daniel Kreiss, Natasha Dow Schüll, Rebecca Lemov, Maria Vidart, Amira Pettus, Jonathan R. Baldwin, and Ruben Hickman
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“Limn is somewhere between a scholarly journal and an art magazine. It is an attempt to communicate and display ongoing scholarly research. Limn outlines contemporary problems. It draws material from networks of experts in the social and human sciences and is intended to be timely, diverse in perspective, authoritative, well written and beautifully designed. The focus is on contemporary problems in our global, politically interconnected, technologically intense culture: problems of infrastructure, ecological vulnerability, economic interdependence, and relentless technological invention.”
Editors: Stephen J. Collier, Christopher M. Kelty, Andrew Lakoff
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