We’re running out of both space and time right now. That’s one of the big problems of contemporary capitalism.
Daniel Denvir:
You talked about the future being foreclosed upon. That term is very applicable when it comes to debt on homes, obviously.
David Harvey:
That’s why I think the term “foreclosure” is very interesting. Millions of people lost their houses in the crash. Their future was foreclosed upon. But at the same time, the debt economy has not gone away. You would’ve thought that after 2007-8 there would’ve been a pause in debt creation. But actually, what you see is a huge debt increase.
Contemporary capitalism is increasingly loading us down with debt. That should concern all of us. How is it going to be repaid? And by what means? And are we going to end up with more and more money creation, which then has nowhere to go except speculation and asset values?
That’s when we start actually building things for people to invest in, not for people to live in. One of the most amazing things about contemporary China, for instance, is that there are whole cities that have been built and not yet lived in. Yet people have bought them, because it’s a good investment.
Daniel Denvir:
It’s precisely that issue of credit that led you to borrow a phrase from Jacques Derrida, “the madness of economic reason.” Colloquially, madness and insanity are invoked to stigmatize or pathologize individuals with mental illness. But what Marx shows us, and what your book shows us, is that the system is actually insane.
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David Harvey:
The neoliberal argument had a lot of legitimacy in the 1980s and 1990s as being liberatory in some way. But nobody believes that anymore. Everybody realizes it’s a con job in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
But we’re beginning to see the possible emergence of an ethno-nationalist protectionism-autarky, which is a different model. That doesn’t sit very well with neoliberal ideals. We could be headed into something which is much less pleasant than neoliberalism, the division of the world into warring and protectionist factions who are fighting each other over trade and everything else.