Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey

The Urban Roots of the Fiscal Crisis
Lecture by David Harvey
The American University of Beirut
May 29, 2009

Sponsored by The Masters in Urban Planning and Policy and Urban Design in the Department of Architecture and Design and the Center for American Studies and Research.

Video from the City from Below Conference of Professor Harvey’s remarks at the opening plenary. Baltimore, April 18, 2009. Read the transcript. Watch the rest of the plenary.

The Urban Roots of the Fiscal Crisis
Lecture by David Harvey
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
April 16th, 2009

How many fiscal disruptions over the last thirty years have been urban/property led? Why does this particular one takes the form it does? In what ways does this fits into a Marxist theory of urbanization under capitalism?

View the lecture

Tonight (Thursday, April 16th) at 6:30 PM Professor Harvey will be giving a lecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design titled, “The Urban Roots of the Fiscal Crisis.” His lecture will be addressing the questions:

How many fiscal disruptions over the last thirty years have been urban/property led? Why does this particular one takes the form it does? In what ways does this fits into a Marxist theory of urbanization under capitalism?

The lecture will be webcast live at this link at 6:30 PM (Eastern):

http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/events/webcasts/

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Also, a couple of recent news articles featuring Professor Harvey:

Urban Theory at the Down Town Club
The New York Times
April 14, 2009

Giddens trumps Marx but French thinkers triumph
The Times Higher Education Supplement
March 26, 2009

Exploring the Logic of Capital
David Harvey interviewed by Joseph Choonara, Socialist Review, April 2009

Some commentators view the current crisis as arising from problems in finance that then impinged on the wider economy; others see it as a result of issues that arose in production and then led to financial problems. How do you view it?

It’s a false dichotomy that’s being posed. There is a more dialectical relationship between what you might call the “real” and “financial” sides of the economy. There is no question that there has been an underlying problem of what I would call “over-accumulation” for a considerable time now. And in part the movement into investing in asset values rather than production is a consequence of that. But as the search for new forms of asset value developed you also saw financial innovation that created the possibility of investment in hedge funds and those sorts of things.

There was a long-term process in which the rich looked for reasonably high rates of return and began to invest in a whole series of Ponzi schemes – but without Bernard Madoff at the top. In the property market, stock market, art market and derivatives markets, the more people that invest, the more prices go up, which leads to even more people investing. All of those markets have a Ponzi character to them. So there is a financial aspect to the crisis but unless you ask why the most affluent were taking that path you miss out on the real problem.

Read the rest of the interview at the Socialist Review.