Contradictions Of Capitalism with David Harvey

if you could summarize capitalism what it is as succinctly as possible what would you say cats listen is or capitalism is a system in which capitalists use money to make more money and the classic way in which they do that is they go into the market made by means of production and they buy labour power and then put it to work and then make a commodity and they sell the commodity and at the end of the day they end up with more money than they had at the beginning of the day and then the next day they take some of that more money and make even more money so capitalism is a constantly expanding system of accumulation wealth and power in capitalist hands and how old would you say it is as a system it had a merchant form way way back in the fifteenth sixteenth century but the industrial form really came in the nineteenth century which is when you started to employ wage labor in large factories and then they were the ones who created the value which which capitalist could then appropriate at the end of the day when I saw the commodity that have been made and capitalism isn't as smooth and as simple in these easy in making that process happen as some would like us to believe so what are the contradictions within that process of capital accumulation well capital accumulation is a sort of continuous process and at any moment there could be a blockage I mean I can take money and then I could look for labor power and maybe all the laborers on strike so I can't find the labor or I can't find the means of production because all the iron ore has ran out or the resources have run out or something of that kind and even when I get the production process going there could be all kinds of things go wrong with the technology and and I've got the commodity I've got to find a market for it and if I made something that nobody wants and all that effort I put in goes goes to waste so there are many points where in fact the circulation process of capital can come unstuck and if you think of it as a continuous process than then any break in the continuity means that actually it's going to be a crisis for capital and big question can capitalism as a system the industrial capital that you're talking about industrial capitalist model you're talking about that began the nineteenth century can that end and if it does or can end what comes after it the problem well there are number of problems with with the system honestly it's about continuous growth in this arises because capitalists reinvest some of their money and I always think well if there were normal people they would just take the extra and consume it and have a good time but they can't do that because they're in a situation of competition without the capitalist so if they don't reinvest as well soon they'll be driven out so the result of that is that capitalism is a system which is about continuous growth and growth compounds and as it as it compounds it gets larger and larger and larger so what we've seen since the nineteenth century is a capitalist system was expanded geographically in intensity more and more commodities of coming on market now if you think about that process and say can that go on for thousands of years the answer is no it can't now when it's going to come to stop when it's going to hit barriers we begin to see some suggestion of limits right now and at some point or other we have to think about another way of making life decent than capital accumulation the story of what's happened since the fall of the Berlin Wall since the Chinese and much of the global South labor markets been absorbed into the global labor market the big story is that actually poverty has been reduced and poverty as earnest that is you know subsisting less than two dollars a day's decline dramatically in the last two decades so what you say to those people to go look in the global North in the West the microwave I've just bought is cheaper than ever and at the same time those works in gwangju are seeing rising living standards so what's the problem well the problem is with the data you're telling me I mean the different ways to measure the data it's true that actually in China for example people now are better off than they were say 20 20 odd years ago because the process you're talking about but if you look at the social inequality in the world you'll see an immense increase in social inequality between the very very rich and the rest for example in the United States where I came from in 1970 generally speaking the chief executive made about 30 times as much as the average employee now they make 350 times as much as the average employee and we've got billionaires popping up all over the place at the same time as we find people are actually more and more kind of in a state of of poverty and be careful about that $2 a day by the way yeah they're getting some people getting now $3 a day but what could you buy with $3 a day and if prices go up and we see actually prices going up and one of the reasons why you start to see revolutions in North Africa and so on is rising food prices and the like so when somebody's kind of says well you know once they were getting $2 today they're looking at three dollars a day and isn't that better than you say yeah but what can they buy with it it turns out that actually it's not doesn't it's not as good as as if those data you cite make it seem right because this definition of the global middle class right which we're told in our massively expanding this is going to provide a big new market for the exporters of the global north there's a new markets now in China Brazil this new middle class I mean it's it seems pretty rickety as a middle class conceived like this $12 well you see in a middle class emerging and in countries like China and it's stronger in India and so on at the same time the middle class is under assault for instance even in the United States the middle class it's diminishing and there is more and more people and long-term unemployment there's more and more people who are just not entering into the labor force and there's a lot of misery and despair going on in groups that used to be satisfied with a middle-class style of life so beat me again it maybe look good over here but it's not so good over there that's that's the big problem classical liberal response everything you just said they say well fine look okay inequality within countries and between countries has dramatically increased since the mid 1970s that's beyond doubt but if the pie is getting bigger and and the poor yeah they get a diminished slice but actually that slice is still a damn sight better than was in the mid 1970s then where's the problem I mean that's the argument I really would literally yeah so I've heard that story since you know I'm a young kid and I'm old enough to remember it in the 1950s that we were going to get rid of global poverty by capitalist development and then you know 20 years later that kind of said well we still got this global poverty problem and 20 years after that you know I always remember Henry Kissinger saying the 1970s will soon do it away with world hunger and here we are you know fifty years later still as there's a lot of hunger around and there's a Millennium Goals that I you know 2000 when they said okay by now by 2015 we're going to get rid of global poverty and we're very close to that it hasn't happened the difficulty here is that actually capitalism as a system thrives on actually diminishing the sort of the the standard of living of the labourer because by keeping wages repressed and wages down profits become higher and and the result of that is that capitalism creates poverty it also creates unemployment because unemployment is one of the one of the levers to keep the aspirations of working-class people down so actually capitalism produces poverty it produces unemployment at the same time as it thrives on that and then it turns around says we've got all this surplus maybe we're gonna back it by allowing us to continue we're going to get rid of poverty but I've heard that story since you know the 1950s so many times that I think it's time everybody woke up and said no you can't use a mechanism that creates poverty to get rid of poverty if we go back to 2008 AIG Lehman Bear Stearns the whole pallava it looked like the end of a certain kind of capitalism for many actually they're now really like realizing it was probably just the beginning of what had preceded 2008 being put on steroids so to speak so that crisis of 2008 and its consequences diminished wages in much of the OECD specifically North America in the United Kingdom in particular massive unemployment in southern Europe how big is that crisis because initially was being compared to the recession of the early 1990s and then they said ok well maybe maybe it's as bad as that of the kind of late 1980s gradually people start talking about the Great Depression or indeed the 1870s so within a historical context how big was the crisis of 2008 crises are always about creative destruction and one of the questions you have to ask is who's benefiting from the creation and his yeah bearing the cost of the destruction officially we came out of the crisis in 2009 if you look at profit rates profit rates recovered by 2009 by 2009 even the financial sector had been bailed out parts of the world successfully so capital was doing more right and actually if you look at the data what you also see is the top 1% of Lee famously refer to them now actually came out of it by 2009 very well and have actually increased their wealth and power very significantly since 2009 so you would say that for the wealthy and for Karen for capitalist corporations after capitalist businesses the crisis is effectively over in 2009 the difficulty was that actually for most of the people this was not the case that unemployment was not recovered you know it's not been cured we've got a very various sort of serious problem of diminishing living standards the share of wages and national income has continued to decline in fact we've it's the continuation of the neoliberal mantra we've heard since the 1970s which is you know keep labor under under wraps keep keep the wage rate down and capital will accumulation can conspire on upwards so what we've seen is creative destruction in a certain class or group of the class has actually come out of this very well whereas the mass of the population which relies not only on wage rate but also on state expenditures because also we've got this matter about austerity and state budgets people who rely on that are what much worse off so there are certain people who are bearing the costs of the destruction and that's actually the mass of the people whereas the capitalist class in the billionaire's Club is getting richer and richer I mean up slam did some calculations and suggested them the increasing wealth of the billionaire's Club in 2012 would have been sufficient to actually cure a global poverty I mean but but that's not that's not happening that's not where the wealth is going it's going into a few people's pockets so if 2008 was the big event for capital in recent years 2011 might be identified as the big year for contentious responses to that crisis you've just pointed out the Arab Spring of course but there were movements across much of the global north as well Spain with the 15m the j14 in Israel of course occupy primarily in the US but elsewhere as well did occupy now three years of three as a past did occupy fail because it seems to me there was a historical opportunity to advance broad demands that could have created cross class coalition's precisely the thing you think is necessary and you sucked towards the end of your most recent book did I'll keep I fail in doing that I don't think occupy actually was even started really in a sense it was a voluntary stick immediate kind of movement and in fact what we've seen around the world over the last twenty years is more and more events which are just eruptions of discontent and then here in London that was the Rahman kind of the riot what we've seen in Brazil just recently is another example we saw in Taksim Square there are these eruptions of discontent which to me signals a broad global discontent with the conditions which are actually arising out of the white capital is working these days occupy was one of those events and it started and I think a little bit was a fairly small movement even though it was claiming to represent the 99% it was a small movement that made those claims and what was interesting to me while two things were interesting one was in a very short time they changed the conversation and actually the the the degree we were talking about social inequality now as an issue and to the degree that for example in New York City we have a mayor who's dedicated to doing something about social inequality that family is not going to be able to do it and to the degree that this issue has come back into even Obama's speeches and so on has everything to do with occupy having changed the nature of a conversation and it's interesting everybody now knows what people mean by the one percent and it's almost current peace of peace of our own had a political discourse that we talk all the time about the one percent and everybody knows what we're talking about so so occupy was successful in changing the conversation and I think that's been important politically the second thing was the speed and the violence of the reaction of the forces and then the way the police came down on it so fast and so hard suggests to me that actually is a deep fear on the part of the bankers and the wall street crowd and 1% that actually a populist movement of this kind might actually get teeth that might get claws and that they were being dangered in some way so in in New York for example what we saw was a billionaire mayor being instructed by the billionaires of Wall Street to get the police out and kicked these people around and that's you know the violent response of political power and relationship to occupy was very marked compared to say the lack of any response of that kind to the tea party a tea party would go out there and there could take some stuff from that I don't know National Monument or something like that nobody did anything but but occupy was a real real threat I don't think they realized how much of a threat they probably were and I don't think I've been there to consolidate it but they have not gone away of course we're likely to see them resurgent in some way and I think that that loves those those kinds of movements as we've seen in gezi Park in Istanbul as we've seen in about you know 50 cities around Brazil recently these movements are not dead they're there they're there alive and well and I think we're going to see a lot more of them one of the big issues is how do they consolidate into something which has a coherent plan of campaign as opposed to voicing discontent and voicing sort of protest songs and protest music and all the rest of it intelligent conservative isms always been characterized by a great quote from Thomas Macaulay reform see the email service also similar line set by Prince tank Radian and that our producers get a bundle we have to change everything to keep everything the same so what extent do you think that elites are aware of the nature of this crisis and the nature the possibility of those kinds of contentious responses to that crisis and that they are capable of adapting to new conditions and actually mitigating what may be a really contentious politically powerful response to it do you not see that coming because beyond the occasional George Soros quote I don't really see it no I think the elites are divided they're divided now by national I mean the billionaire's Club in India is very different and Russia is rather different from elsewhere so I don't think they have a consolidated view there are some of them like Soros and Buffett and you know the big philanthropists who think that was something that should be done but by and large I don't think the elites have an idea of what to do because what they see and I think this is again very significant what they see is that the repressive apparatus the policing apparatus of surveillance and the power of the state could be fairly easily used crush any movement of this kind and I think that this is going to sometimes be done violently in other cases and then it's going to be simply controlled through infiltration and I mentioned the violent response to Occupy Wall Street we see a violent response in Turkey for example the one had an engaging gezi Park and I think that this is a this is an ongoing issue and I think right now to the degree that there is any consolidated response on the part of the 1% it's let the state take care of it we give them we elect them we we control them let them turn the police dogs on the people and we we can preserve our wealth that way and there's very very little empathy I think within the top 1% for the conditions of life of the mass of the population right now so if the powerful from Adler grams Turkey to the United States to Spain Italy the UK if the powerful are saying that perhaps we can no longer rule through consent and where that's not the case we have to resort to coercion in that context of what use our institutions and electoral processes for those who want to change things I think electoral processes are I think most people are convinced that electoral processes are pretty useless and that's a pretty strong conclusion that the so-called democracy we have is really the democracy of money power and that there's nothing much that can be done let's continue to hope that maybe you can do something different for instance I mentioned we have a liberal mayor elected New York City who has made some gestures about what he wants to do but what's immediately clear is the Wall Street power structure has moved in very very fast and has put a Corral around its possibilities they've essentially bought the Democratic governor of New York States in the Democratic governor of New York State now disciplines the one person in the Democratic Party who might actually try to deliver some sort of transformative politics for the NASA of the population so again I think that political people recognize the political process and they may be wrong to do so but I think this is a great frustration with with the electoral process and out of that we what we begin to see is what I would suggest is a new way of doing politics which involves things like the protest movements and things like setting up assemblies regional assemblies trying to set up self-governance structures and so on to do and to do politics by by other means it's not got very far and what form it will is in take and how it will institutionalize itself I think is yet to be seen but I think what we're seeing is a kind of a bypassing state and the bypassing of the political process and attempt to do something different as we see in Spain through the indignados and less reason you've seen it's throughout many of them more continuous process movements that have existed in different countries final question are you an optimist depends which day of the week Thursdays I'm an optimist on Friday I'm a pessimist whether I go back again it depends on the situation that I think there's a there's a lot of room for hope actually so I would not say a universal pessimist but there are some days when I look at the situation and I say how on earth can everybody tolerate the idiotic way which this world is being run in the face of some very very simple solutions which could be arrived at simply by being decent human being saying look bless everybody have a good share of the pilot everybody join in into a collective kind of process of self-governance and I so I think there's a there's a sense of that around my encounter that so I get very optimistic but then I know that what happens in the news and I kind of go this is terrible okay thanks very much grouches

Channel: Novara Media

Views: 54,643

Keywords: David Harvey (Philosopher), Capitalism, Capitalism (Idea), David Harvey (Academic), Seventeen Contradictions And The End Of Capitalism, Philosophy (Field Of Study)

Id: zizsxmydUQg

Length: 21min 45sec (1305 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 12 2014