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David Harvey: the modern great pretender

Summary:
David Harvey should be declared one of the great intellectual pretenders of our time. He poses – with immense media help – as ‘the’ doyen of Marxist Political Economy whereas he is not an economist and he is totaly ignorant of Marxist Poltical Economy. He also poses as the standard-bearer of anti-capitalism whereas in fact he is an anarcho-reformist. His latest utterances (https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_global_unrest ) are revealing:   capital right now is too big to fail a revolutionary overthrow of this capitalist economic system is not anything that’s conceivable at the present time. It will not happen, and it cannot happen, and we have to make sure that it does not happen. So the kind of fantasy that you might have had – socialists, or communists, and so on, might

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David Harvey should be declared one of the great intellectual pretenders of our time. He poses – with immense media help – as ‘the’ doyen of Marxist Political Economy whereas he is not an economist and he is totaly ignorant of Marxist Poltical Economy. He also poses as the standard-bearer of anti-capitalism whereas in fact he is an anarcho-reformist.
His latest utterances (https://www.democracyatwork.info/acc_global_unrest ) are revealing:
 
  • capital right now is too big to fail
  • a revolutionary overthrow of this capitalist economic system is not anything that’s conceivable at the present time. It will not happen, and it cannot happen, and we have to make sure that it does not happen.
  • So the kind of fantasy that you might have had – socialists, or communists, and so on, might have had back in 1850, which is that well, okay, we can destroy this capitalist system and we can build something entirely different – that is an impossibility right now. We have to keep the circulation of capital in motion, we have to keep things moving, because if we don’t do that, we are actually stuck with a situation in which, as I’ve said, almost all of us would starve.
  • therefore a socialist program, or an anti-capitalist program, of the sort that I would want is one about trying to manage this capitalist system in such a way that we stop it being too monstrous
Of course, D.Harvey professed all this old crap under the rubric of

‘ David Harvey’s Anti-Capitalist Chronicles’.

In terms of psychology this certainly falls within the case of schizoprenia.

However, in terms of theory and politics it belongs to the case of the imposter

Stavros Mavroudeas
He is currently Professor of Political Economy at the Department of Social Policy of Panteion University. He was previously Professor of Political Economy at the Department of Economics of the University of Macedonia. He studied at the Economics Department of the National Kapodistriakon University of Athens, from where he received his BA Economics (1985 - First Class Honours).

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