#newwaysoflife

[jso129]

Thank you to my friend @kogrady1263 for sharing!!! 💜🥰 I’m pretty sure I need to continue to adopt the Swedish and Danish ways of life!! . . . #Hygge #Fika #NewWaysOfLife #HappinessForAll #LetsBeHappyTogether #TheBestLife #Friends #Coffee #Tea #SlowDown #AppreciateAll #TheLittleThings #LifeIsGood (at Littleton, Colorado) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsogXibAQst/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1vhou79jm1uok

[daisyforyou28-blog]

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

"The book begins with the very thing that sparked the 2008 crisis: the conflict between use values and exchange values, particularly in housing, and the way that people have been deprived of homes because real estate has become a speculative investment. Increasingly, he points out, more necessities are defined and dominated by their exchange value, as capital looks for new fields in which to play.

"For this reason, many categories of use values that were hitherto supplied free of charge by the state have been privatized and commodified—housing, education, health care and public utilities have all gone in this direction in many parts of the world," he writes. "The political choice is between a commodified system that serves the rich well enough and a system that focuses on the production and democratic provision of use values for all without any mediations of the market.

The rest of the contradictions unfurl from there: For example, the value of money, especially when it is not tied to any tangible metal standard; the relationship between capital and labor, in which capital is trying to increase profits and productivity while labor seeks to increase its standard of living; capital’s rhetoric of freedom versus reality, in which it dominates labor and the poor.

Toward the end, Harvey explores the "dangerous contradictions": capital’s requirement of endless compound growth, the ecological destruction it wreaks, and, in the last chapter, "universal alienation," in which he explores the forces that hamper meaningful work and promote vapid consumerism. Capital can survive its contradictions, he writes, as long as it heaps more burdens—in the form of class inequality, degradation of the environment, and curtailing of human freedom—on the people and institutions already holding it up...

He asks readers to imagine an economy in which the necessities of food, housing, and education don’t go through a profit-maximizing market system; in which money "rots," so it can’t be hoarded; in which the pace of work slows down to accommodate creative endeavors and social life; and in which a "zero growth" economy is a desirable stasis, not a national emergency...

Most of us, he says, have been "neoliberalized"—we have come to believe the tenets of a well-funded campaign that exalts the individual, privatizes social services and public institutions, and scorns the potential of government. The left, he says, deals in "a politics that rests on narratives of victimization," which doesn’t inspire solidarity. Nongovernmental organizations, a main tool now used to address inequities, are supported by the rich and therefore cannot criticize the wealth and accumulation of wealth that feeds them. Personal debt, which has emerged as a major burden in recent decades, may be the most crucial challenge. "One of the things about debt is that it tends to foreclose the future—you have already spent the future," Harvey says. "It is very difficult to have an imagination of something radically different when your future is already pinned to some continuation of capital." 

Excerpted from "Mapping a New Economy" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/18/2014)