[lbo-talk] Firesale of the Empire

[brad bauerly]

>
>
> I can't say you are wrong, but I don't read him that way. Harvey
> nominally ties accumulation by dispossession to (re)production, but he
> also makes it clear that under neoliberalism the former is easily
> dominant (I think he says this in the chapter on ABD in The New
> Imperialism). Finance provides the link, and so for Harvey
> house-flipping, in which poor people are fleeced of their savings, is
> the zeitgeist of the era. Apparently those people labor for nothing.
>
> Oh, and the pithiest definition that I can recall Harvey giving of
> both ABD and neoliberalism is this: The ?main substantive achievement
> of neoliberalization [...] has been to redistribute, rather than to
> generate, wealth and income.? The dominant capitalist mode rearranges
> value, it doesn't create it.
>
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Where does he say this?  I don't remember him ever positing ABD as being the
dominant form under neoliberalism.

For me the problem with Harvey is that his ABD flies directly in the face of
his other major thesis in which there is too much capital and nowhere to
invest it.  I don't know how dispersively accumulating more assets overcomes
the problem of too much capital that he is always stressing (which is also a
problem IMO).

Brad