David Harvey's Anti-Capitalist Chronicles

Technology has become the largest industry in the world. In this episode of Anti-Capitalist Chronicles, Prof. Harvey picks up where he left off from the previous episode to further explore the implications of technology as a business. To do this, Harvey looks closely at Apple as an example—the labor conditions in China, where the product value actually comes from, and the differences in profit rates between the company itself and the production companies further down the supply chain. As the tech sector continues to explode, Harvey begs us to investigate the ways in which it shapes our lives and choices: through concealed exploitative practices, monetization of access, artificial intelligence, and more.

In this part 2 of 2, Prof. Harvey continues his talk about the totality of our capitalist economy. He contends that totality is not something that pre-exists, that can be uncovered through investigation. Rather it is something that is created through human activities and therefore is constantly evolving.

In this episode, Prof. Harvey talks about the factors and conditions that enables COVID-19 to become a pandemic and the ramifications for the economy and for social life.

In this episode, Prof. Harvey argues that we cannot survive this viral crisis without a radical reconfiguration of the social and institutional arrangements. Any revolutionary transformation of society has to operate across all dimensions: technology, relation to nature, social relations, production apparatuses, social reproduction, institutional arrangements, State apparatuses and mental conceptions.

In this episode, Prof. Harvey argues that this crisis has afforded us an opportunity for significant change. With so many people out of work, freed up from producing wealth for the capitalist class, instead of hoping that things go back to normal, and people return to the low-paying, exploitative jobs, that we give serious thought to reorganizing our society and work to create something radically different.