At some point or other, there is going to be, and going to have to be, a collective system
of organization which is going to somehow rather structure the economy in such a way that it deals
with these crisis tendencies which are around right now. And I think that it's interesting that
the crisis of 2007-2008 was focused on housing markets. The coming out of the crisis was largely
due to the fact that China built like crazy fixed capital formation and consumption fund formation,
particularly in housing. About 15 percent of gross domestic product in China was on housing alone.
In other words, you got into the crisis because of the housing problem. You got out of crisis
by the housing problem. And now, you've got the pandemic, and we're coming out on the pandemic
with guess what? Almost everywhere, housing prices are going through the roof. Everywhere, there's
a housing crisis, and there's a housing crisis in the double sense that there's a vast amount
of investment going into housing, but there's a crisis of affordable housing. So in other words,
we're making an economy which is adequate for capital, which produces urbanization and housing
and all the rest of it as a tool for stabilizing the global economy rather than as a tool for
satisfying the fact that there's a crisis of affordable housing wherever you go in the world.
So, these contradictions are not contradictions which we can easily master and deal with without
massive organizational collaboration between different states. But, we are actually seeing
the the play out of these on the ground right now. For example, if I said to you, right now,
there is a huge problem in the United States, which is about the moratorium on evictions,
evictions from housing. That is, your large number of people are likely now to lose their housing in
the next six months or a year because the courts have now said that the moratorium on evictions is
unconstitutional. And so, we're going to see massive evictions and that's going to create
all this kind of stuff. Around us, there's crazy building going on. At the same time, no affordable
housing. At the same time as you're evicting large segments of the population. It's quite possible,
in the same way that seven or eight million households lost their their housing wealth in
2007-2008 in the United States, we are likely to see yet another wave of that, with another wave
being set up by the fact that right now, we're seeing these abstractions which I'm talking about.
They're abstract, but what we see is they touch ground. They touch ground in very fearful ways,
and right now, this whole kind of question of the lack of affordable housing, the moratorium and
the fact that many people are going to be evicted in the next six months. And there's likely to be
all kinds of social unrest attached to that. And so, this is where the theory touches ground,
touches it in a very visceral way. So, here in New York City, we're likely to see all kinds of
problems of this sort emerging in the next six months. And yet it is the power of abstractions
which I'm talking about which lies behind it. Therefore, understanding those abstractions
says well we can put band-aids over this whole kind of problem of housing, affordable housing,
right now. We can do some of that in the same way that band-aids were put on the sort of conditions
in factory labor by the factory acts of Britain in the 19th century. We can put band-aids on it, but
at some point or other, we have to address the way in which capital is functioning as a global system
right now and the rules by which it is governing. And it is the abstract rules of motion to which we
are forced to adapt, and the only way that they can be dealt with is by complete agreement
that this system is no longer functional in relationship to environmental questions,
social provision distribution of wealth, and the like. And those are the sorts of questions
which need to be addressed, and it goes back again to that first level of abstraction. What's
the relationship between what is happening to individuals now, to capital in particular places
in particular times, and capital in general? And what's the relationship between them?
And how we should understand that and the levels of abstraction which are involved?