David Harvey & Andy Merrifield: nuevos libros en la calle

Lo nuevo de dos clásicos del marxismo (urbano) contemporáneo está a punto de salir: el esperado diagnóstico general de David Harvey sobre las contradicciones del capitalismo y las líneas de fuga del sistema; y la reapertura de la vieja cuestión urbana de Castells por Andy Merrifield en el nuevo contexto de urbanización planetaria.

Un par de pasajes que les darán una idea del objetivo de cada libro:

What I am seeking here is a better understanding of the contradictions of capital, not of capitalism. I want to know how the economic engine of capitalism works the way it does, and why it might stutter and stall and sometimes appear to be on the verge of collapse. I also want to show why this economic engine should be replaced, and with what. (Harvey)

Yet several decades [after Castells’ The Urban Question], after a lot of reading, a lot of talking and listening, after a lot of political hope and a fair bit of disillusionment, after a lot of wandering around the world, I finally got down to writing my own version of Urban Question, entitled, somewhat unoriginally, The New Urban Question. It’s a short, polemical book, a hopeful book that nonetheless tries to cover a lot of ground. It goes back to the source in order to move through and beyond the times, our times right now, when any “Marxist approach” to the urban question demands hard answers; not least because now the dialectic of the urban as a site of capital accumulation and social struggle has changed. As the Thatcherite 1980s gave way to the Blairite late-’90s, and as it stands today, extended reproduction of capital is achieved through financialisation and dispossession, through dispossession and reconfiguration of urban space. The urban is no longer an arena where value is created so much as extracted, gouged out of the common coffers, appropriated as monopoly rents and merchants’ profits, as shareholder dividends and interest payments; the urban, nowadays, is itself exchange value. (Merrifield)

Pueden encontrar más información sobre ambos aquí (Harvey) y aquí (Merrifield). Para abrir boca, les dejo con este vídeo de presentación de su libro a cargo de Andy Merrifield.