David Harvey on Karl Marx

yeah good evening good evening ladies and gentlemen and uh welcome to the Bali in Amsterdam my name is Kiron ven Hill and I will be your host tonight um also a special welcome and I tried to look into the cameras to the people joining us through live stream there's quite a lot of of them because this event has sold out completely so congratulations to to all of you uh here with us tonight um yes what are we going to do tonight well um first of all let me say that uh this evening was organized um by the Bali in partnership with uh the iisg the uh International Institute for social history um home uh I don't know if everybody here in the room is aware of that but home to a a considerable Marx archive since 1937 uh which includes some unique UNESCO world heritage pieces such as the only surviving uh handwritten page of the Communist Manifesto um and also a first edition of Das Capital Hand connotated by the author himself well this week uh the same iisg is hosting an international uh conference a scholarly conference conference on Mark's writings um unfinished and unfinishable project um and some of the scholars attending that conference are actually with us tonight so a special welcome to those guests as well but of course um what we will be um um mainly discussing tonight is um the work of Carl marks and then especially seen Through The Eyes uh of another hero of many of us here uh in the audience tonight David Harvey um welcome to you uh author of uh uh this book among many others 17 contradictions and the end of capitalism let's just uh see a raise of hands who has read this book see okay still work to be done uh I can highly recommend it um by storm sorry sorry really it's really taken place by storm yeah yeah yeah um now now that we're at it I'm I'm just curious to see who we have in this audience is is there anybody here who has never read dapal yeah yeah people who have never read The Communist Manifesto yeah they're there um is there anybody here who considers themselves a Marx expert maybe don't be shy don't be sh we don't have any marks experts I saw a half raised hand yeah that that was my next question that was my next question marxists yeah yeah a few not that many yeah oh okay now they're yes and um do we maybe also have capitalists in the house tonight yeah we all are says someone yeah through our Pension funds we may all be capitalist yeah who knows do we maybe have Marxist capitalists they also exist no not quite well um it is uh my my great honor um to introduce to you our our special guest of the evening um one of the most cited Humanity scholars in the world um David Harvey professor of anthropology and geography at the City University of New York where um he is director of the center for Place culture and politics and um Mr Harvey has actually taught dapy tal for more than four decades um his course on um DUS capital is um uh actually um has been downloaded by by over two million people um if you haven't checked it out online um please do so it's uh it's it's really uh um quite quite fascinating um it appeared on the uh on the website only in in mid2 2008 so in a few years time uh over over two million views um this year he published uh uh this book that I I just raised 17 contradictions and um the end of capitalism and tonight ladies and gentlemen he is here so please give him a warm welcome Mr David [Applause] Harvey yeah well thank you for uh this opportunity um and we're here actually I'm I'm here actually to participate in this uh conference uh which is trying to re-evaluate what Marx was about and what his work stood for in the light of his actual manuscripts uh now I don't consider myself an authority on marks I don't consider myself an uh an expert on marks um I'm a sort of a a fellow traveler in a way uh and my real interests have always been in uh urbanization and urban change and urban uh configurations and I went to the United States in 1969 at the end of a decade of urban uprisings uh and I ended up in the city of Baltimore about 6 months after a large chunk of the city had burned down in the wake of the Assassin notion of Martin Luther King now there's a story about uh English academics or British academics who go to the United States and that is they get there and they either go to the far left or they go to the far right uh well as you can see I went to the far left and frankly it was the experience in my encounter with the city of Baltimore U what was going on in the richest country of the world and the world's hegemonic uh capitalist power that was so appalled me that I thought there has to be some way of understanding uh this uh this situation and frankly I found all of the social science literature that i' been weaned on including economics and sociology and so on just didn't seem to have a framework to understand what the Dynamics were and what I was encountering and when I got to Baltimore uh I got involved in a big St on housing uh because clearly the lack of housing provision adequate housing provision for marginalized populations uh was part of the problem of uh uh inner city uh impoverishment and and so uh what I did was to start to study this but couldn't find a an intellectual framework uh that was satisfying so it was at that point that I sat down I thought well I'll read marks his Capital just to see if there's anything in there that's of any use whatsoever so I sat down and I with a bunch of graduate students and we read it after one year and after one year we all decided we hadn't understood a single word of what we were really reading so we decided to go back again and take another look and see what was going on and during this course I had this very interesting interaction which has actually been true for all of my academic life that I was writing this big report on housing in Baltimore and on page one Capital volume one and you find this distinction set up between use value and exchange value and it's a contradictory relation it's one of the first contradictions I look at in 17 contradictions and a house has a use value and it has an exchange value we're delivered housing increasingly in in a city like Baltimore via an exchange value system which obviously is not providing adequate use value so this is this is real tension in the housing market around this kind of question question and therefore there has to be some way in which the exchange value system has to be restructured in order to provide use values to marginalized populations and populations with low income streams and the like so um I was part of this group writing this report on housing and we were working with landlords Bankers Federal officials City officials all the rest of it and and and uh this group looked at me and said well okay you're British and you know how to write so you write the you write the report you know so I got landed with writing the report and so I thought well I better frame it and how do I frame it so I framed it around the idea this distinction between use and exchange value and I thought this is a very interesting way to look at it h and and it made a lot of sense to me in terms of what the Dynamics I was hitting at so the report comes and we the reports finished and everybody kind of looked at said well that's interesting and we put it to the bankers and we put it to the landlords and we put it to everybody and their immediate response was this is a fantastically interesting way of looking at housing and I thought my god do I tell them where it came from and and of course I didn't I didn't dare you know but actually one of them kind of said you know we thought you were one of those economists and you're going to us all that demand and Supply that never works but this is a really interesting way to look look at it let's you know let's let's let's and and and so so I thought to myself well you know if that concept on page one of volume one of capital makes so much sense to all these people around the table then why not use it it's common sense it's very easy to understand and it catches your attention and if you ask people politically do you want to live in a society where some people are maximizing exchange value and whether you get the use value or not depends purely on the rationing of the market system or do you want to live in a society that delivers adequate use values to everybody in some sort of reasonable way what would you choose most people would say deliver the use values so politically it also makes some sense and actually when you read on in marks you find the abolition of exchange value is one of the long-term objectives of what a transition to socialism would be about so so to me working on this I thought to myself well you know all those Frameworks I reading in conventional social science did not make sense this made a lot of sense and it not only made a lot of sense to me it made a lot of sense to people around the table and and so I thought well you know if I can get this from page one of capital I better go to page two and see what I can find out there so then I kind of went on through and and actually there's a lot of of beautiful common sensical understandings which come out of capital when you learn how to read it right and that's an interesting kind of question which we're going to obviously get into uh tomorrow uh and and and and so so to me uh this was a kind of a bit of a revelation so I stuck with it and I I kept on having all of these these sorts of experiences uh with with these insights that came from Reading uh marks and Engles and and and and so on and for instance one of the great lines in the housing question of Engles is that the Bourgeois never solves its housing problem it only moves it around and and I thought that's very interesting way to think about it cuz in Baltimore that's what exactly what had happened the federal government had funded all kinds of revitalization projects in this part of town and that part of town did get better for a little bit but another part of town went down the shoot so you moving it around and engleson kind of says you know people what they do is they they they you know the Bazi claims great you know great credit for improving what we now call gentrifying a neighbor neighborhood and say look it's much better look how it looks beauti it looks beautiful now and then you kind of say but are the same people still living there the answer is no where did those people go well they went down and they made a slum somewhere else you know I mean this is the this is the the Dynamics you go on so I was again another meeting with all of these sort of U officials and there was a a president a vice president of the Chase Manhattan Bank from New York was invited down to Baltimore and uh I I gave us talk about the house issue and I talked about this thing about not you know a lot of these projects we're looking at don't actually solve the problem they just move it around and therefore what we got to do is to try to come up with a housing structure system and finance and all the rest of it that doesn't have the effect of moving it around and uh by then some of the people in the city had decided I was a bit of a lefty and therefore they went after me and they started attacking me and I was defended by the Vice President of the Chase Manhattan Bank it's the only time it's ever happened but it he he really defended me he said look we did this big renewal effort I mean I mean there was some serious corporate stuff on this in in New York in the 19 late 1960s early 1970s he said we went do a lot of work on this we did a lot of work on this and and at the end of the day we we we were very proud of ourselves for having changed this neighborhood but then we found out the same people were not living there so this problem of moving around is very crucial and you know we've got to deal with it so he was right on my side you know so it was kind of again it was a common sensical kind of thing and and and people could see it and and easy easy if you like to understand and the Dynamics was really there the funny thing about that story was afterwards he says well where did you get that idea from it's so good have you published much and I said well actually I thought I'd fess up this time and I said I got it from Engles and he says to me is he at Harvard so so the the point the point I'm trying to make here is that that actually my reading of marks was always a very practical reading of marks because I was interested in these Dynamics and I was interested in what was going on on the ground uh around me and the way I did it was very was was uh a lot of the time I was you know involved in these reports doing some of these researches you you know reading other people's reports I was also you know clipping news items out of the the press and and taking stuff from all over the place so one of the things I was really interested in Reading in one of the papers that being delivered tomorrow is how much marks was always clipping newspapers because I have a I still have a cartons of of of clippings from sort of uh early 1970s about you know what was going on in terms of the Dynamics of of of transformations in in in Baltimore that was and I was getting this sense that this thing is in motion it's moving and there are institutional arrangements and there's class privilege there there's and there's ripping off and stealing going on in all this this kind of thing so so so I kind of find uh the Practical side of marks being terribly important and and and to be honest if if something comes up and and you wait through one of Marx's theories and I just can't make it work for me in an urban context on the ground I kind of say well in that case Marx is useless I mean Marx was not a God he didn't get everything right he got a lot of things wrong he got something things crazily wrong uh but then it turns out and this is again one of the things that really comes out of uh uh the manuscripts being published is that that Marx was writing particularly in volumes 2 and three of capital was writing a lot of stuff based on notes and a lot of ideas and their conflictual ideas and essentially he was writing them in a vein that kind of said well this has to be further examined this is an idea that needs to be taken up and this is kind of a possibility so so what comes out of reading that marks is one of of infinite possibility of interpretation and and and the like which of course is great for marxists because marxists love to get at each other so you can read this stuff and kind of obviously there's going to be some great fireworks tomorrow I'm sure you know sort of you know you're right know you're wrong kind of kind of stuff but but what but one piece of which is a bit consensual in the literature I'm reading about it because I I like I said I'm no expert but is that Engles actually turned Marx into feeling far more definitive than he actually was that there's the questioning marks there whereas uh Engles tended to treat all of these manuscripts as sort of uh kind of uh penultimate uh drafts of a book almost there whereas really they're PR Preparatory notes for for for investigation and in some instances angles tightened it up and made it more assertive and and all the rest of it and that's again something that's coming out of uh the study of these these notebooks now this coincides of course with with uh in a sense a different very different situation in which uh we can we can read marks uh in these times when I was first reading it of course uh the Soviet Union was still there China was still very maist and and and all the rest of it and there were strong political parties around particularly in Europe who had very distinctive line if you're in the Communist Party you believed this if you were part of uh Mandel's trotskyist movement you believe that if you were you know so there were all these kinds of different things and so there was a lot of of of of competing Dogma around uh but a lot of that has has disappeared uh not entirely of course but the Communist parties have disappeared the power of the Communist uh movement and of course the Soviet Union has has has collapsed and China has gone uh kind of neoliberal with chines characteristics or state Monopoly capitalist with Chinese characteristics however you want to call it so so we're in a very very different situation uh in which it's possible I think to liberate Marx from certain of it of his historical chains which were built by the Marxist movement around certain of his propositions and there are a number of his propositions that I never found very convincing uh even when I first started reading marks in relationship to the things that I was interested in which I as I've said was urbanization uneven geographical development uh what is happening to people on the ground in a city like Baltimore what are these social movements in the city about to what degree are they class movements and how can we understand the relationship of those movements to the Trade union movement what's the relationship between politics of the in the residential sphere politics in the in in the workplace all those kinds of questions so so to me uh like I said i' I always had a somewhat skeptical view of of some of the elements within uh the mar oology I was encountering at the time uh for example since I was interested in urbanization I had to familiarize myself with the question of land price land rent and all the rest of it so in the limits to Capital which was the first book I wrote uh about marks in thinking I spent a lot of time talking about the question of rent because you can't understand urbanization and Urban Development without understanding Pro what's happening in the property market and what's happening to all of that kind of thing but uh presentation on on uh Marxist theory at the time usually ignored the stuff on rent the same also turned out to be true of uh of of interest and the credit and financial system so again I had to find you know if you're if you're dealing with urbanization you're dealing with debt financed uh uh housing construction debt financed infrastructure construction you're dealing with fixed capital of long life U embedded in the land you're dealing with all these kinds of things so urbanization cannot be understood without understanding the categories of of of of in circulation of interest bearing capital and and the notion of rent and it can't be understood either without looking at the merchant capitalists and what they're up to because when I looked at the problem in Baltimore what was going on there were rent extractions going on landlordism was a real problem and and furthermore there were all these kinds of uh crooked things going on in in in land financing there was something called the land installment contract which was a way of ripping off vulnerable African-American populations and exactly the same way back then as happened you know just a few years ago uh also so so you find all of this going on you kind of say well this is this is this is politics this is real politics this affects people's lives and it's furthermore it's it's it's it's class politics and then there were all these studies of the time around 1969 that kind of said the poor pay more so if you look at the operations of merchant Capital within a city what you'd find is that certain parts of the city uh you can get good produce at relatively low cost in the vulnerable inner city areas you get lousy prod products at very high cost so the the poor pay more and the poor get ripped off more this was going on and you kind of say this is a class phenomena and I don't understand why marxists are not interested in talking about it well it turned out most marxists throughout are not interested in urbanization and I've had this big argument with people kind of saying you know urbanization is one of the biggest things you can actually look at I mean look at the transformation of urbanization that's gone on over the last 40 years and isn't it interesting that many of the crises we've seen over the last 20 years have been Associated based in the property Market not only 2007 2008 uh but you go back and you look and you say well what happened in in in in Southeast Asia in 1997 98 well there was the Tyler it was the Thailand popular property Market that went bust uh Sweden actually went through its own little crisis had to nationalize the banks in 1992 because of excessive speculation in property markets in the United States there was a housing and Loan uh kind of Crash uh in in 19 late 1980s uh I mean these these things are going on all over the time and and and and somehow marxists are still talking about you know a series of crazy propositions about oh it's all all to do with the falling rate of profit or oh it's all about you know what's going on with labor in the price of production you say look I'm not diminishing labor in the point of production I think that's very very important but I'm also thinking about you know the class character of people's lives in neighborhoods people's the class character of the forces which are arranged around them and after a while also you start to see that there's a big difference and this is where a reading of volume two of capital comes in between where Capital where where value is produced and where it's realized it's okay it's produced in a point of production we can all all right accept that I mean I some problems with it but let's accept that but where it's realized is that uh it may be realized not by the producer at all it may be realized by the merchant it may be realized by the banker it may be realized by the landlord it may be realized anywhere and actually if you start to look the direct producers often work with very very very low margins there's a piece in uh uh financial times this morning the the operating uh profit marginal rate uh of Apple is 27% so it's it's it's making 27% foxcon where all the Apple stuff is made is operating in a margin of 3% this means the value is being produced by foxcon in China it's being realized by Apple in the United States look at the relationship between Walmart and its producers in in in China it's it's produced one place it's realized somewhere else and it's not only necessary realiz by the merchants it's also realized by all these others who can extract value from from from this from this system and and you can even pay workers more and say if the workers get very very very very tough and struggle very hard and this was also going on in Baltimore in the early uh six early 70s the workers very very hard and they politicized and all this kind of stuff and they managed to get in higher wage rates so they're better off huh well what happens if suddenly oh they're better off okay we can charge them more rent okay what happens if we can actually suck them into the sort of credit relations where they actually you know have to pay their credit card costs I mean what you know so again where capital is where capital is produced and where Surplus value is produced and where it's realized are two different kind of things and you have to understand the the relationship and the circulation that's going on here between production and and realization and actually when you suddenly look at the structure that Mark set up between volume one and volume two of capital volume one is all about production it says there's no problem of realization and these thesis about the increasing impoverishment of the working classes which you get in volume one of capital is predicated on the idea that the economy has absolutely no problem of of selling Goods everything trades at its value so Marx makes all of these assumptions actually in building that particular kind of theory and actually those assumptions all carried over into volume three and the way he specified the falling rate of profit all those assumptions and you get a completely different story in other words Marx is full of contingent propositions which go like this if the world is constructed like this then you see this but if you change the initial propositions you get a different story and Marx is perfectly well aware of that and these are the kinds of things he usually did he said okay we're going to make a very small confined model under certain limiting assumptions and those limiting assumptions are there and and then I can Define for you what's going to happen we're going to get a falling rate of profit but now I relax the assumptions and as I relax the assumptions what do I see I you don't get a falling rate of profit at all you get something completely you know completely different so you have to learn to read marks that way but you didn't I didn't need the mega manuscripts to tell me that because it's obvious when you're just reading the text as they've come down to us that this is what is going on and it's very surprising to see that those the way in which marks abstracted and theorized about things uh is is is structured in this way and you get a very very peculiar responses for example in the general law capital accumulation where he's talking about the production of an industrial Reserve Army he assumes there is no problem of finding a market and that there's no nothing no implications of the way in which the Surplus value is divided between interest rent uh profit of merchant capital and and the like in other other words those those those questions are completely eliminated from consideration in volume one of capital now is capitalism a world in which you know those things are don't go on where there's no implication of how the credit system works and what the credit system is about and how it operates well of course not and Marx knew that perfectly well but he would say things like well the credit system can come in here but we leave that till later well you know the totality of the thing would require that you get back to what has been left later and and reintegrate it back into the story which is what I had to do when I was looking at urbanization I couldn't leave it and say okay I got to examine the Dynamics of the property Market in Baltimore and commercial use of land and all those kinds of things I could I couldn't examine all of that and say I'm going to examine it as if the credit system didn't exist as if rent didn't exist because I'll deal with them later I couldn't do that I couldn't look at what happened in house man's Paris when I did big the big study on Second Empire Paris without looking at financial institutions what developers were doing rent and all the rest of it you just you know so the Practical side of me was saying well I need to put all of those things into the picture and I need to integrate them with some of the Dynamics which which is described in volume one and then is also described in a different way in volume two because volume two is not about production it's about realization which means that it's it's about the market how can you actually take the capital uh and the value that's being produced and make sure that it gets realized in in in the marketplace in some way or other what happens if there's no Market there and that's where marks also famously started to say well there's a real problem here because the workers are getting poorer and poorer and poorer and if they're getting poorer then where the hell is the market going to be for for for for for the for this product so you get different arguments coming out in volume two and end of volume one you see the poor the workers getting poorer and poorer and poorer at the end of volume two Mark starts talking about the way in which the workers need their income needs to be jacked up by bgea philanthropy and all the rest of it in order that they can engage in something called rational consumption and rational consumption Marx as Marx defines it is about the kind of consumption that's required by the producer in order to realize their product so the structure of Marx's argument starts to come in in in intervision precisely I think because because of the necessity of using these these sorts of things and then you look and see well the falling rate of profit for example is specified as if and it's exactly the same propositions as in in volume one the falling rate of profit occurs because uh there is increasing productivity and as there's increasing productivity you need need less laborers and if you had if labor is a source of value then there's less value being produced and therefore you're going to get a declining pot of value because of the Dynamics of technological change which are which are predominantly labor saving I mean that's the sort of s sort of argument but that presumes that you can do that without any problem of realizing the the the the product in the market and all those other kind of assumptions it assumes that there's no role of the credit system in here one of the arguments that I would make is that the repression of wages which has gone on throughout much of the capitalist world since the 19 mid 1970s onwards has to some degree been relieved by the the explosion of the credit system and as the credit system explodes then that of course gives you a fic fictitious demand which is accelerating and in in some in some s sort of way now this kind of leads people however to then then then look at what Marx did and kind of say well if Marx could specify the falling rate of profit without mentioning the role of of credit then obviously what happened in 2007 2008 and truly there are a bunch of marxists who really argue this what happened in 20072 2008 had absolutely nothing to do with financialization they must be mad I mean completely mad I mean I mean what what a ridiculous proposition and they said well Mark specified the falling rate of profit you know without talking about interest so we don't have to talk about that but actually when you introduce the the the the the the Dynamics of the financial system you see all kinds of things happening there and again one of the things that seems very important to do and why I've always felt very important to do is to either broaden the way in which Marx's Concepts work so that they can Embrace certain situations or actually to say well I I'm not going to use that idea I don't think the falling rate of profit is a good idea frankly I mean I think it's a plausible argument that may occur in certain kinds of situations but one of the corollaries of that argument is that Capital should be employing less and less labor and actually the world's labor force is expanded by 1 billion people since about 1980 the 1 billion more wage workers now than there was in 1980 so first that's the first piece then you kind of say well okay what are those wage workers doing are they productive of value or are they doing something else and we have this habit of saying you know now car producers are producing value because they're producing cars and I say well what about those people producing hamburgers and everybody says oh well you know that's not really you know it's not masculine banging things and this kind of stuff there it's kind of but act actually why why are prod people producing hamburgers not producing value of course they are and and how many restaurants have grown up over the last 50 years and what's happened in the restaurant trade and how much value is being produced and how much Surplus value is being extracted and you only got to take Marx's definition of value and say it's not simply about the individual labor but it's about the collective labor to say oh well the collective labor includes the waiters as well as the people who are actually making the Hamburger so let's let's actually look at the production of value and surplus value in McDonald's and isn't it interesting that McDonald's is now the biggest employer of Labor in the United States far more so than General Motors that used to be the biggest employer of Labor back in the 1970 the biggest employers of Labor in the United States are Walmart McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken but they're producing value all of them okay it's just we don't like to think you know it's not it hasn't got that image of the of the you know the unionized worker you know with the great sort of hammer and sicker and all that kind of stuff somehow it doesn't doesn't and of course A lot of it is precarious labor and a lot of it is is is is temporary and all we know all the problems with that but we can't actually not sort of take Marx's categories and and and if you like use them creatively and this again seems to me to be one of the things that actually comes out of my reading of what the the mega stuff tells us is that Marx was perpetually critiquing and Rec critiquing his positions and if we like to call ourselves a Marxist then we should be prepared to do the same but you often find actually a lot of people on the left are incredibly conservative that is I have the truth here it is don't mess with it don't change it no it's got to change because things are changing very dynamically and when people kind of say look uh is this was Marx's project something that was unfinishable the answer is well yes of course by definition because history moves on history and historical Dynamics are there we're living in a different world now than so we have to actually adjust very much but we can take some of those initial propositions and start to use them again in creative ways one of the things that uh I recognized and had to recognize way way long ago in the Baltimore housing market case was you're not simply dealing with a commodity that's produced with an exchange value and a use value and all the things that go on in the exchange value SE section you're also dealing with a situation where there's actually a great deal of robbery and thievery going on and actually if you look at what happened in the subprime crisis in the United States the amount of illegality that was going on was huge there was downright robbery going on it was and a Florida judge at some point said this when presented with a whole these facts he said you know this is this is one of the biggest transfers of wealth of private property wealth in American history and it's all been done illegally the foreclosures half of the foreclosures were illegal now what's going on in a foreclosure 11 11 million foreclosure notices have been served in the United States since 2008 11 million 7 million of them were actually operated in about five or six million of LED people losing their houses this was huge and actually a good half of that loss was illegal now what is this and how did how did it turn out to be illegal what were the mechanisms the primary mechanism by which it was rendered illegal was of course via the credit system now when you look back and you sort of say well wait a minute let's see what Marx has to say about the credit system well he talks about it as a vehicle of speculation he talks about it as a vehicle of extraction of of wealth but in the chapters on primitive accumulation he talks about the credit system as being one of the major re me means of primitive accumulation now some say we shouldn't say primitive we should say original accumulation but the tendency was always to say in the transition from feudalism to capitalism this this transition was going on which was based on illegality and violence and and that but that all got over as it were and then and then capitalism became kind of legal with some you know illegality on the side of course but the mass reappearance of illegalities of the sort we saw in the credit system was equivalent to the way in which uh the money lenders actually destroyed feudal power way back and and and it's like primitive accumulation but there's no point telling calling it primitive accumulation so I decided to call this accumulation by dispossession well people got mad as hell at me and they say you wa you can't go around talking about accumulation it's primitive accumulation you got to call it primitive accumulation because Marx called it that and I would find myself saying things like you go talk to an Iowa farmer and say you lost your farm through primitive accumulation and they look at you and say you're out of your mind what are you talking about and you kind of say you this is you're an prime example of accumulation by dispossession and they get it immediately yeah there's been accumulation and I've been dispossessed somebody has ripped me off okay so let's go with the let's go with the with the thing of accumulation by dispossession how much accumulation by dispossession has been orchestrated through the financial system how much of capitalism's survival over the last 30 40 years has been through manipulations of this kind well I can't quantify it for you I just know that the loss of asset values in the African-American and Hispanic communities in the United States was around somewhere between 4 and 80 billion dollar okay and that around that time Wall Street was awarding itself bonuses of between 40 and $80 million now I can't show that that money went from there to there but if somebody loses $80 million over here and somebody gets it for free over there in particular gets it for free over there for screwing up the world's Financial system it seems to me that actually there's a good argument inferential argument that kind of says look there's some relationship in this totality which is robbing off people here and and and putting assets over there again this is something that you have to kind of look at and and and use in Dynamic sort of way and when Marx wrote one of his great initial essays which was kind of for a ruthless criticism of everything existing it's a very modest title you know but when he did that it seems to me we have to actually exercise that amongst ourselves and and one of the great things about reading Marx's texts is that actually he has so many ideas about you know how things relate to each other and and what I tried to do in the 17 contradictions book is to put together some of those ideas around the theme of of contradictions and what became very interesting to me as I worked on this was the way in which the contradictions relate to each other I mentioned the contradiction between use value and exchange value and it's always you know it's very very very critical but that you can't have that contradiction without having a measure of exchange value so you need to have a measure of exchange value what's the measure of exchange value it's money but what's money money is a representation of value which is the social labor which is done uh which people do for others mediated through the market system but there's a a real problem when you look at volume two volume one of capital you see immediately that actually there's a real contradiction between the representation and what it represents that actually social labor cannot be privately appropriated directly can only be privately appropriated because the representation of social labor takes a form I.E money which can be privately appropriated by private persons so there's actually a contradiction between between value social labor on the one hand and its representation money now that contradiction allows private persons to appropriate social wealth and that of course then actually underpins the existence of a class distinction between those who can appropriate the private wealth and those who could have to give up uh who appropriate the social wealth and those people who have to give it up and beyond that of course then is the fact that that none of that system can work without private property and private property cannot really work without the state so you've got another contradiction between private property and the state so suddenly the contradictions all relate to each other they're all integral with each other they flow into each other and they support each other and in certain instances they counteract each other that is if the use value exchange value system gets out of whack then the state might step in and do something about it in fact in this case what we see is the state stepped in and made it worse through the 1995 Housing Act in the United States which actually encouraged subprime lending and it did so for a very good social reason that is the poor had no access to credit so the answer was give them access to credit and actually the left during the early 1970s was waging a huge struggle so that minorities women and people in general of U of of of of low means could get access to Credit in fact that was a left cause and something was passed in the United States called the community reinvestment act which forced Banks to open up and actually give credit I mean in the mid 1960s women could could not get credit African-Americans could not get credit recent immigrants could not get credit and and this was their for considered one of the reasons why uh impoverishment was perpetuated so okay open up the credit and then what happens well all of this other stuff happens you know later on down the line this is what contradictions are about which is very good politically because what it says to you when you're thinking about what your politics is about is be careful what you ask for really be careful what you ask for cuz yeah they can open the spigots but if it's a class dominated system which is going to actually suck wealth out then there you go there you go so there are lots of ways it seems to me that by by giving a much more fluid kind of understanding of uh of what Marx is about it becomes a fantastic base upon which to to actually start to probe into Dynamics and problems of this kind and and to me it's it's it's been a fantastic experience always to go back in there and and teach the thing again and then suddenly find oh my God you know there's a piece here that I missed last time which actually opens up say a theory of de-industrialization in volume two there's a whole theory of de-industrialization which I never realized was there until I did the companion to volume two and I suddenly thought you know three pages wow you know he really he really lays it all out there very very very simply as to why this is inevitably going to be the case so for me this is a very exciting moment in the sense that that there are all these possibilities opening up partly because there are all these questions about the text how much angles actually interfered and made it into something that that it wasn't uh all the kind of questions that Marx had uh asked and all of the potential solutions that exist in those in relationship to those questions and and for me anyway there's the both an intellectual excitement about this but I think also a political excitement because what those contradictions I'm talking about tell you is roughly what we should be thinking about should we be thinking about the construction of a society in which some people can make immense amounts of money in The Exchange value system uh on on providing maybe use values and if you ask people well would you rather have a use value denomination uh dominate over exchange value considerations in housing provision Education Health Care you go down the list and even in the United States they'll all say I'd rather live in a use value system but people then don't want the state to do it because they see the state as essentially crooked so you go to none of those contradictions between private property in the state and say all right how do we actually transform that world into a world of associated decision making management of the commons and things of that kind and in other words new institutional Arrangements how do we deal with the way in whichone money is a representation of value and how money has become uh actually a law unto itself so that it becomes the representation actually dominates what it represents how do we how do we deal with that situation so all these kinds of political questions that come up and and and by Framing those political questions right I think we can get a different kind of political orientation not a program but a political orientation asking sort of basic basic basic questions as to where we would like our society to head and in what direction it should head and there are many other issues I think of this sort which I hope will come up uh in the discussion so let me leave it there and say thank you very much thank you very much to D have a [Applause] seat I'm sure lots of you have lots of questions uh from Mr Harvey there will be time for that later on but first I would like to to introduce our two panelists to extinguished guests we invited to discuss some of the issues raised uh uh by David Harvey tonight um Let me please introduce to you our first guest our first panelist aval Angela professor of financial geography at Amsterdam University and author please have a seat have your pick thank you and here WR a senator for the Dutch Socialist Party uh who teaches economy at Amsterdam University and is an internationally renowned U marks expert just out of curiosity gentlemen but when was it that you were first introduced to Marx's writings Mr Harvey can I David can I ask you yeah well uh I started to read it when I was 35 years old mhm uh didn't consider myself a Marxist so I wasn't uh I just sort of got into it for the reasons I said that there was no I couldn't make sense of what was going on around me in any other way and did it make perfect sense to you the mo first moment you read it no no no no no no no no I didn't understand it the first time I read it and then then at that point sort of a certain feeling of academic pride comes in and you say I'm not going to let this defeat me I'm going to really understand this sucker you know uhuh how how was that for you too what how old were you when you first were introduced to Marxist writings well for me it was I a small Capital reading group as a second year student and that was the time of the theud uh movements uh actually uh two years after I I was teaching it at a at a poly technique uh because the students there social academic uh they had uh managed to they wanted to to have to be taught marks and economics so what was your first impression when you read it you we're in that reading group well the first the first uh chapters of capital are extremely difficult they are I mean it's not a didactic work the the first three chapters are the most difficult ones of all of all the work uh uh must have been the mid 90s um the Netherlands was undergoing this neoliberal revolution public discourse was dominated by the terminology of globalization it was about free trade it was about economies of scale was completely dominated by neoclassical economics and I had this gut feeling that neoclassical economics didn't make any sense and then I had I was doing social and political philosophy at University of Amsterdam I had two supervisors I wanted to write a master thesis criticizing neoclassical economics that's sort of a a humble undertaking um for your master I had two supervises who were basically of your age David um and they were welfare first in the uh the long history of the social sciences and they pointed me towards some text that I needed to read and among them were also texts by by by Marx and your next question what were my experiences well one of the issues with the texts of Marx is that you're not only when you start reading them you're not only reading KL Marx you're also reading the immense amount of interpretations and exegesis that has been given on top of that and I have found that absolutely intimidating so I will not say anything about anything that Marx has written this evening because it's way too intimidating way too intimidating I'm glad to hear that I was not the only one who felt that way after first reading marks so um do you all agree that the um last or maybe I should say current uh financial crisis created a new interest for marks I mean um um is is marks more topical now than AB absolutely um what is quite striking especially in Europe we have this very sort of Divergent crisis experience in the UK and the us first the Euro Zone and Japan what is quite striking especially in the Euro zone is that five years six years after the crisis in Europe it started in 2008 in in uh in in the US the it's always 2007 so in in the US it's the seventh years of the crisis in the Euro Zone it's the six years of the crisis it hasn't dissipated it's still here and and of course proof of that the fact that people still feel that and want to discuss it is the fact that you could have sold this room out three or four times something something like that so there's a huge amount of interest in these kinds of critical analysis of capitalism especially financialized capitalism what kind of interest uh is that is that is that a predominantly scholarly interest you think or is that uh a predominantly activist or political interest what do you think I I think it's a mix of there is some scholarly interest but I think uh I more people in social movement area are are looking at it um I think they are looking however for people like ourselves to produce uh literature that they can readily understand and I get a little angry at my scholarly colleagues because they're very busy making marks far more difficult than he already is and and that's the way of course in which you get tenure in Academia uh so I think that uh that actually there is uh a lot of interest but I think the other thing that's is different now and I think this maybe is that uh people are just curious there there's there you know people used to take my Capital class and say I'm a radical I'm radical or something they never say that anymore they kind of say uh you know I just want to know what this this this guy's about you know and and and so let me let me let me see but is it only about what the guy is about or is it also trying to make sense of the conjunction I think I think they were like me you know way back you know they're curious CU they're sitting yeah they're sitting in these classes and they they don't make that doesn't make any sense econom economics 101 doesn't make sense in relationship to what's going on so they want to they want to have something else but have those people changed have Marx's readers changed I mean you've been around you've you've you've read marks for the last four decades um um have have have they changed and has the has the dialogue and the discourse changed oh I think so I it is more around this curiosity and I think that uh people don't actually my students don't like uh dogmatic readings they they want to and I tried to do the companions in a way to say look here's how I see it but you can make up your own mind kind of thing I think even NE classical economics students don't like dogmatic teaching any longer want to change the teach you teach economy at the University of Amsterdam yes uh it's very interesting that in standard macro and microeconomics are the main fields that uh money plays no role uh money is a convenient uh medium of exchange and and that's it uh and okay there also a course thought and money and banking these courses are separate separate terrains it's up to the students to to connect those because the the professors won't there own fields and well it's it's the the the act the actual bankruptcy uh out there uh shows also the bankruptcy of of this of this way of uh of looking at the world I mean the mainstream economics way of of looking at the world I'd like to to get back to to Marks um um David I once read uh an interview where you said that you do get invited to talk uh uh and discuss marks uh to talk about and discuss marks on BBC but not on um uh NPR American uh uh public television and you said there is a kind of Taboo in the mainstream media on taking any of this seriously yeah yeah where where is that coming from well it's the long history of mcarthism and that uh there's still plenty of people who as soon as you mention Mark start screaming about you're an apologist for the murderous behavior of Stalin and Mau and all that kind kind of thing and they then threaten you with all sorts of things so it's you know so there's a it's still it's still like that yeah yeah there's still some of that but but but there's a very uh of course the media is is incredibly centrally controlled and financed and uh NPR for example if I got on NPR uh major contributors would likely withdraw their their support uh for NPR if uh if I was on there MH mhm so it's it's all part of but but isn't it because what I found quite striking about your uh lecture that you just gave was that you're actually arguing against a dogmatic interpretation of Marxism my own experience when dealing with people who call themselves marxists that they have a tendency to become Believers um and that is something that I personally find highly unattractive um and that has everything to do with the fact that um what you want to get at is the workings of again the current conjuncture of financialized capitalism and that basically requires you because it's extremely complex it has all these strange interlinkages across scales etc etc so you need a big toolbox and the toolbox can consist of quite a lot of different kinds of theoretical perspectives and it doesn't matter where they come from as long as they provide you with access to the stuff that you want to undisclosed actually sort of suggests that you should be like a theoretical mepy using different elements uh and what you sort of suggested is that that's the way you read marks you see it as a series of notebooks different approaches different possibilities and you use those possibilities in order to understand some of the things that you're fascinated by but that's not my uh sort of common experience when I deal with marxists what do you what do you think around this table what do you think the biggest misunderstanding is out there about Marx's work well the the biggest I think he almost almost mentioned this the biggest misunderstanding is that uh Marx's main work capital is about Socialism or communism uh I think that the term uh communism is mentioned some 10 times in in a footnote 2,200 Pages uh then marks also wrote a a political pamphlet The commun this Manifesto and there you find one page one page with principles of socialism uh and you find one paragraph about nine lines about what uh communism is about and and that's it mainly uh so Marx Marx is a it doesn't mean that marks wouldn't find that that that important at all but in my view he didn't see that as a as a writing desk uh matter I mean the road to to Socialism or or communism or or whatever he was sympathetic to that but he didn't see that that as a as a writing desk matter and well a precondition for him to to get that way is to is to First understand capitalism uh thoroughly and that's in fact the object of this this main work Capital that he that he do uh that he didn't finish that he didn't finish and that uh is maybe unfinishable the unfinishable project I agree I agree with s the object the object changes continuously which is one of the ISS issues that social scientists are being confronted with it's not a unchangeable object the object transforms itself there is of course some some elements of it which are more durable but it it changes and that that is at the same time the fasination of yeah but there are also important continuities I mean uh we have a class relations yes class relations exploitation of Labor uh Banks take a share in the interest of of the the the profits produced in Enterprises by labor I mean that there there are a number of important continuous relationships and then further you're right I mean there are the the the complexities of of the financial system uh well that that sorry to interrupt but what if Marx what if we could invite Marx to join us at this table and and what if Marx would be actually witnessing what's happening in in the world today some of the uh phenomena of which you you have just eloquently described what if we could uh time uh uh um Zoom marks into uh uh Occupy Wall Street protests or the indignados or uh flying to the World Cup protest in Brazil or the recent uh uh European Central Bank protest in in in Italy what do you think he would make of what's happening today David uh I I mean natur I think he'd be mystified as he was back I think in 1857 or so uh by the fact that there's not a revolutionary movement I mean so many people have been ripped off so badly around the world everywhere that you would have thought that by now people have said enough is enough let's get rid of this system and make one that's much more Humane I think yeah I think my my guess is he would he would be appalled that for example uh I mean the amazing thing about those foreclosures that I mentioned uh maybe six million people lost their homes and preliminary surveys about what they thought was at fault was they blamed themselves this is a classic neoliberal personal responsibility kind of thing and he would be appalled at the State of Consciousness uh that existed yeah if if you take the Netherlands the Netherlands lost uh potential outputs to the tune of something like 25% since the outbreak of the crisis um Dutch taxpayer had to pay 125 billion in order to save Banks that's approximately again uh 25% of Dutch GDP um we're still in the midst of a crisis a lot of bankruptcies especially small and mediumsized Enterprises people looking at negative equity uh almost a third of all people with a mortgage uh loan contract have negative equity um and I just before I came here I looked at Twitter what is is trending in the Netherlands is Black Pete and that is sort of that the huge amount of distraction that is being provided by all these sort of superficial quasi political issues which draw so much political attention oh hey get real this is about the bankruptcy of financialized capitalism and what do we do we zoom in on blackbeat it's a I think that is a discussion that is a discussion that not everybody in this room might agree on with you um but can we agree to to actually Park that discussion for another night um I'm not going to attend that evening by the way obviously not white man um but what I would like to to take from your point is uh the lack of um um Revolution uh that would lack of anger lack of movement uh uh actually prop in forward what do you think here is the explanation for that well my impression is that uh if you get to kind of revolutionary movements anyway that is not that is not in in a crisis that is in a in the in the in the high in in the luxury of of in high days like in the in the 60s for example' 60s early '70s these were high days so you're saying actually the conditions for for people to unless people are starving yeah that that's not a matter people people are starving uh that that may uh give rise to prises but there have been but there have been some very significant movements I mean over a million people took to the streets in Brazil last year but a lot of these movements are ephemeral you know this a rise and fall very fast uh we've seen uh we saw what happened in Istanbul around G Park uh and have again a lot of these uh uprisings by the way uh the thing that connects them together is that they're all about the qualities of urban life and you see this is where my focus on the city becomes I think terribly important because they're not so much uprisings in the workplace there you know bus fairs in sou Paulo spending money on uh World Cup uh and Olympic things when actually you needed on housing and health care and education and uh all those sorts of things and and again gazy Park was about you know the kind of way in which the shopping mall is displacing and and and and the other thing that's interesting about them is how contagious they can be for a very brief period like in Turkey it went from ankora to ankora and then ismir and then all the Turkish cities were in uproar and and the same was true in Brazil it starts in sou Paulo and then it's re phase you know so so we do have a pattern of social protest right there but it is typically shortterm uh unpredictable because you know Stockholm right suddenly there was that kind of thing last year so you never know where it's going to break out and what it's going to be about and and of course we're seeing a rerun of some of the issues in uh in in Ferguson in Missouri those sorts of things but one of the things that attaches to this of course is the incredible militarization of the response yeah and that is I think one of the one of the key things we're looking at and the militarization in itself is creating another form of response which is an attack upon the militarization and nobody knows quite how to deal with the fact that in Ferguson I mean it's a it's a small community they had had enough tanks there and enough armor to kind of you say what on Earth is this doing here and and and and what are they preparing in for and and same is true of occupy occupy immediately gets attacked by the police uh in the way the tea party never did you know so I think the political response right now is itself uh really really Troublesome but at the same time is eliciting a certain kind of opposition that triggers my my last question uh before I uh I give the floor to uh to you because I can feel the questions burning here in the air um last question to you now is is a peaceful transition still still still possible H how how big would you would you say the likelihood of that is David well I think you're likely to see two two twin things I mean I I'm personally very interested in what I call uh revolutionary reforms that is the kind of reforms which uh when they're pressed further become revolutionary I mean Marx uh was interested in the abolition of the wages system but then the first step was the shortening of the Working Day and the realm of Freedom begins when the realm of necessity gets left behind kind of language so I I I kind of I kind of think about uh certain uh uh reforms which have the seeds for uh further pushing and and you know I always go back to something like the Mida plan in Sweden and things like that which I think were were were were ways to to to to maybe do quite a bit but as I've said uh I think the violence of the response of the political classes right now which is Extreme those classes are extremely wealthy have no empathy whatsoever for the the state of life of the majority of the population and basically look at to the state to say Crush those people if they get out of line and I think that that we're likely to see therefore uh violence which is going to come from that qu and it's going to elicit violent responses and they've got piy on their bookshelves to uh let's uh show that they have a conscious have a look at the audience for questions I'm going to do it this way I'm going to collect three questions at once and I'm going to give them back to the table and uh ask the uh our panelist to reply to three questions so my first three yes I'll start with you yes please if you could um I'll hold the mic because I'm a control freak um H if you could introduce yourself and ask you a question hello my name is Yuan bendine I have a question of uh David Harvey um about contradictions uh a logician would say um uh anything can follow from a contradiction so uh what I'm really trying to get at here is um how do we get from this mess of contradictions to a successful campaign thank you very much question number two I saw H here yes um there was a a question what what marks do at this table uh these times and I I'm I'm very brief um I've got a connection with him of course and he is saying that under the present circumstances or the existing relationships the production forces become destructive utterly destructive it that of course we experience now with the uh with the environmental degradation Etc and then his solution thus things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of production forces not only to achieve self activity but also merely to safeguard their very existence and that's very much going on now against everywhere the cracks coming in capitalism everywhere we see flowers coming coming up in those cracks and self activity and and to safeguard the very existence it's very individuals that Association self activity it's very remote from any stalinistic thinking you so I'm sorry but I I didn't I didn't get the question did you get a question or is that just me no no so what is your question no I asked where does this come from ah where does this come from that was the question okay thank you very much I'll come to you later now but these are all men and I'm a feminist so I give the floor now to a woman yes there you go thanks my name is Angela and I've got a question um for the entire table or actually mainly David Harvey um capitalism without a state is a chimera it's a Utopia uh it cannot exist without the state infrastructures um I in in Rebel cities uh you mentioned a couple of uh anarchists David Harvey so I'm I'm wondering like can we envisage uh non capitalist State I would really be interested in you answering the these questions because you in all your work you you never really answered that fully thank you okay so I go back to the table now some tough questions uh for you all uh first about the contradictions uh then I'm not going to repeat the quote but what did you mean by that or where does that come from and the last question uh about uh the possibility the feasibility of um actually a non-c capitalist State well the contradictions uh um yeah they're they're I think they're indeterminate in the sense that you're you're saying that they can go on for a very long long time uh the question is when do they get to a point where something has to give and and my argument uh would be that just to go back to the use value exchange value uh argument uh if you had a choice between uh supporting the continuation of an exchange value structure that uh allows wealth uh to be sucked out of the mass of the population in or in return for providing minimal use values uh of affordable housing for example for the mass of the population I think you would say we want a system that provides affordable housing for everybody uh we have this C situation in most of the major cities of the world right now where upper class housing Condominiums and things like that I live in New York you go around and there are there are big Condominiums and you know at 9:00 at night there's no lights on in them nobody's living there uh they're just simply speculative items uh for people to play games with uh at the same time as they're you know thousands of people homeless and and a lot of people living in inadequate housing and you kind of say that's kind of situation I want to remedy and I want to pay attention to the use value side and if the exchange value side is not doing it right then we you know we abandon the the using that and we find some other mechanism which uh ties back into the state question is the mechanism going to be the state uh Marx was a bit ambiguous about that I think that his initial response to say well it should be Associated laborers uh getting together and deciding on their own production and so there was a model of worker control in a sense which is the beginning point for transition but then I think marks also recognized when it came to Big infrastructures like uh you know uh building whole transport networks or sewage systems or water supply systems that you needed you couldn't do it simply through a bunch of associated laborers getting together and saying okay we're going to build uh the Brooklyn Bridge or something that things can't happen that way we can't build airports that way we can't so we need some kind of apparatus that has the capacity to provide infrastructures uh and I think it's very difficult to imagine an apparatus that doesn't look something like the state I would like however to also point out that there's a tendency to homogenize the state the state has arisen itself in relationship in response to trying to control certain contradictions and one of the thesis I put here is there's no such thing as a non-contradictory answer to a contrad ition uh and and therefore the state is itself full of contradictions and we see how the contradictory aspect of the state has been actually accumulated by an oligarchy and a capitalist class essentially to its own own benefit but there's no reason why uh some form of State could not actually be designed and and and constructed and I think that uh it's interesting that several of the groups I know I'm very sympathetic to the decentralized uh assembly type politics which you often find but it can only go so far when you get to a certain certain questions of of scale of operation uh assembly structures don't don't really work so I yeah I get you know I quite like some of the anarchist proposals like reading muray bookin and things like that I think because they they're they're very Democratic and and and I think give a good scenario for how how the Democratic base to socialist society might work but but there are problems when you you move to this other scale of what has to be done and there is a myth that somehow or other global warming will be solved uh by everybody being decentralized well actually uh be careful what you wish for because that could make things very much worse unless you really look out so again there has to be some mix of of of layers of things and that that that seems to me obvious and and and I I get a little impatient with those groups on the left who have that what I call a fetishism of organizational form that there is only one organizational form uh that we can admit and if it if it if it's if it's not horizontal then we don't have anything to do with it so even there you argue for the fluidity that you argu can I can I sorry can I in in for the sake of time because there's a lot of people still can I ask you to to respond to the gentleman who wanted to get your uh yeah yeah well as I understood it what what we're talking about is uh some of the Marx's proposals uh in relationship to uh again one of the myths about Marx is that he was in favor of of of State Control uh in the United States Marxism is understood as dictatorship of the State uh but Marx is not in favor of dictatorship of the state and I think was beginning with that Associated laborers actually getting together and transforming their own conditions of production and we do see in solidarity economies and all these other things that are occurring all around the world signs of this happening and then there is a decentralized kind of movement but as I've said I think that it has limitations when it comes to things like you know dealing with the fact that one of the big scarcities in the world right now is water and water provision is coming critical and the idea that you know decentralized communities will collectively end up doing something which is going to be good in terms of the water situation is just just just not there so you need have some Supra organizational form which is going to deal with scarcity of Water Resources all right I see lots of hands um and uh I'm going to ask your permission to run a little bit late is that okay I usually ask the crowd's permission because maybe there's people who have to catch trains we're supposed to and now but I also really would like to honor uh the energy in the room room so uh we're going to run a little bit late I'm going to collect two more rounds of questions so maybe we do four now can you deal with four yeah so okay all right I'm gonna start with you yeah my name is Shan and uh I would like like to ask David is there any hope left for the working class now the robots are coming good question good question uh yes my question is also to Professor Harvey um you mentioned early in your uh lecture that uh Apple makes 20 6% profit while it's a manufacturer if I understood correctly makes 3% um to me this makes perfect sense as there's a lot of more like design intellectual things going on at Apple than at the manufacturer so I was wondering what was the point you wanted to make there thank you robots Apple um I'm moving up yes I'm payman Jeffrey I have a comment on a question about the lack of resistance uh anger uh I totally agree with AAL that there is lots of distraction but uh the point of Black Pete is that the distraction is that people are busy with racism but no this important because Marx was writing about the necessity of the solidarity between Irish workers and British workers for instance thank you for making that point there's a question I had a question um um David was rightly uh talking about the importance of uh realization of value and that lots of movements are being shaped around that but of course still it is important what is happening at the point of production and there are still strikes going on and how can we bring both together because that's uh I think very important for the coming uh period because we are going through a transition of reformation of workingclass identity Consciousness and even composition and that's the reason why we have a lack of uh resistance so if we can maybe manage to bring those together uh we can move forward thank you very much last question on this round I saw your hand I'll come to you in the next last round hi my name is my name is Renato I'm from Brazil uh I'm actually going to connect with uh the previous question uh here in the Netherlands there is a notion of freedom of expression which is often used uh as freedom of Oppression uh so freedom of expression you can say you are racist you can say you hate women or whatever and uh I actually see the this kind of behavior in Brazil manifestation who turned out to be very far right and the results are being seen now in the election we have the most right parliament in 50 years I would like to ask the table and Mr Harvey what what do you think about this kind of uh new subjectivity that is uh becoming explicitly uh a bit fascist thank you very much for those questions let's start with the first question uh on the robots should the working class be afraid yeah I think I think they they should but at the same time I think that uh you got to be careful not to fight I mean the Left fought uh a losing battle against Automation and Manufacturing uh in the 1970s into 1980s de-industrialization the same thing is now happening in Services uh you go to the airport and you check yourself in you go to the supermarket and you check yourself out I mean so this is all this is all happening um but there are still uh I think uh many areas which are increasing and expanding and there are limitations on uh on on on robots but we shouldn't I think uh resist automation I actually think automation is a good thing uh the question is well how do people you know what does what does work mean in in this new situation of of of uh you know artificial intelligence and the like right let's um move to the second question of the gentleman in the corner about um uh value uh add it um you know there's there's a whole argument right now about cognitive capitalism and that somehow or other scientists produce immense amounts of value whereas workers on the production chain don't um if Apple got uh 10% and uh Fox conon got 10% that might work but this is just simply Monopoly power uh and monopsony which is being used uh and is used by Walmart as well uh by the way Walmart doesn't innovate much I mean at least you know Apple does uh so so I think that you have to be very careful about venturing into this this world of uh uh you know taking one line out of the Grier about uh uh the general intellect and turn it into a general theory of cognitive capitalism seems to me to be kind of bit shaky stuff Capital you forget to mention the tax Arbitrage which is conducted by Apple um most of their profits is kept outside of the US jurisdiction so they don't pay any taxes which basically mean that they don't contribute to the maintenance of the material and immaterial infrastructure which is of course suggesting that the profitability is coming out of fiscal creativity yes a lot of it a lot of it is well a lot of major corporations these days are Financial corporations they make General Motors yeah then to the point of the gentleman uh they're in the green sweater yeah I think that no I mean yes of course there's there's a lot of work going on and you know and I was like the way gramy talked about this way back in 1919 he kind of said okay the factory councils are very good but they sound they're sectorally organized we should organize the community because in the community we put together street cleaners and bankers and all this and and Bank Clarks and and and all the rest of it we get a better idea of what the the total condition of the working class is we get a much better perception from there by putting those two together and having organization in neighborhoods and connecting them to organization uh in and the workplace is is is the optimal form of uh of of politics and this gets back to the kind of question of subjectivity I mean I think a lot of issues these days are are about the creation of subject political subjectivity uh and you know this is a big topic and and I don't think I can go into some of the things I think about that uh here in any any detail but it clearly is something that has to be uh has to be looked at I mean the the way in which neoliberalization uh has been about a transformation of political subjectivity on the part of many elements in the population is in itself I think uh and uh an indication that political subjectivity is not something that's fixed it is actually created and and therefore one of the failures of the left I think has been not to be working on kind of the transformations of political subjectivity in a mass uh in a mass way uh and that means producing the literature is producing the thing but that then requires building access to the mass media it all all kinds of things of that sort which are very difficult to do given the concentrations of political power right now and just also um partly explained the rise of fascism in a country like Brazil like the gentleman over there well yes I I I mean you know I think it's uh I mean it's this is even more serious a problem it seems to be in Europe than it is in in in in Brazil uh it's uh very you know countries like Hungary and so on are just just appalling right now and uh it's very difficult to see how there can be any you know radical transformation and MH all right now um yes I will come to you but first I promised a gentleman over here that has been very patient with me I'm going to ask you to be concise the announcement said talks about petti and I haven't read his book yet I have to confess but it is his analysis is supposed to be that the rise of interest on capital is rising faster than what laborers can earn what can marks add to that analysis interesting question what can marks add to Pik now on my way down here we have I I thought uh I saw two hands here yes oh yeah um okay so I was really interested in your um theory of accomodation of this possession I don't know if I speak it out correctly but um I was wondering how uh it relates specifically to uh press groups according to you uh for instance women ethnic minority groups she mentioned the idea of loans that it was first an idea of emancipation and well that really turned around but there's also been some criticism or marks that he actually never dealed with sexism explicitly and that he really thought that uh it was natural for women to uh well um act in a certain way so how would you deal with specific Ops like that interesting question we actually partly discussed that over dinner so I'm glad glad you asked that question yes um also to Professor Harvey um I I really enjoy the fact that you are non-dogmatic about about Marxism and in my own sort of drive to also try to find new sources to be non-dogmatic about reading Marx I came at some point um to Hana arent and I haven't read a whole lot of uh Thoughts by by by you and your books but I haven't read all of them I must admit um about their relationship and one of the things that she says that I'm particularly interested in in is that Marx's idea about history Marx's ontology of history is very similar actually to capitalism's ontology of History namely as development that's unfolding as as Theology and that there are certain problems with that and I I was wondering whether you could speak to that and what you think about aren's interpretation of marks now um we've talked a lot about subjectivity I'm going to be very subjective and you are going to ask the last question of tonight so I know there are still other questions out there but if you could come to the microphone my question is about revolutionary reforms I really like that idea and my question is what are criteria to say that the reform is actually really revolutionary and second does David Harvey have any ideas concrete ideas for revolutionary reforms at this moment thank you very much now back to yeah you can clap for that definitely can where should we start shall we start with the question by gentlemen Pik what can marks actually add well well Pik did not write a book about capital and didn't write a book about uh the capitalist mode of production he he wrote about a thesis about the production of inequality uh and then came up with this very kind of uh simple kind of thing about uh you know the rate of growth versus the rate of return on Capital and said you're going to get increasing concentration of wealth well kind of that's what Mark says happens in volume one of capital uh so you know why bother to read when you can read volume volume one of capital and and and I think it's very it's very interesting these things come out at certain political moments and and and I think that uh you know the Keynesian left in the United States has felt disempowered for some considerable time you know people like stiglitz Krugman and so and not being listened to in the in where it really matters and They seized on that book and used it I think as a vehicle to get their own voices heard so they started praising this book to the sky so everybody so he became a bestseller and it's it's it's renowned I think for being the most the the most unread bestseller of all time that is people don't get Beyond about page 20 and uh then put it on the table and make everybody impressed by the fact that they've read Pier you know let's move to uh to the question uh here on my right uh about um gender and Marx's work well well yeah Marx was a bit uh ambivalent uh on on this he he made some very kind of sexist comments every now and again and he then made uh I think some very profound comments about new new relations within the family and the role of women and things of that kind so you know you can take it both ways but he was basically a Victorian and had a certain kind of Victorian sense of morality so I don't you know again this is something I don't there's a lot of things in Marx I kind of say okay well you know he's he's that's that's where he's at and it's not as if I look to Marx for guidance on uh on on on questions of of gender or or or or race or or or the rest of it but but then Marx's topic was not that I me one of the things I did in the contradictions book is to say there's a difference between capital and capitalism Marx basically uses the word Capital all the time it's a bit rare that he uses the word capitalism capitalism is the whole historical formation if you like which exists which is which is complicated in all its kinds of ways whereas the theory of capital is specifically about how the capitalist mode of production works and what its internal contradictions are and that's what he's after in capital so his his his his objective is is not to unravel all of those things and you can kind of say all right well I'm not going to read him because he doesn't he doesn't deal with the questions I want but on the other if you want to know how Capital works then there's probably no better guide to it than actually going through and looking at marks and you know working through some of the ways in which he sets it out and we have two two questions left we have the question here um by the gentleman um um asking um oh now I'm trying to rephrase it and I'm losing it can you can you summarize it in oh yeah about Hanah of course how could I forget about hanahand and we have the question by the lady over here uh about uh revolutionary reforms yeah well again so we start with h irand in writing well you probably might want to but but in writing you know Marx often wrote in a way that's a bit teal logical no question about it but actually when you get into him a lot of the time what he says is is it's impossible to be te logical it's not uh it's not a linear unfold I mean he does use that language sometimes but other times he uses a completely different language and then you decide to yourself what kind of language you want to you want to go with I I'm a kind of anti- logical and I think the unfolding of contradictions is a much more interesting way and when you look at those unfoldings you end up with a non-t logical because there's all these possibilities which can means you can go this way or that um I found very useful by the way I used her a lot in uh uh the new imperialism book because she has I think a very good take and in particular understood the role of primi she and Rosa Luxembourg between them understood I think the role of primitive accumulation and the continuity of of of of primitive accumulation and and so I I find her her work uh uh quite quite interesting and then there's a question about revolutionary uh reform well there are there are lots of U um revolutionary reforms which it seems to me the the the simplest way to look at it is to say we have to undo uh all of what thatcherism was about we have to undo all of what pinet is about and to their credit I think the student movement in Chile is probably most strongly able to articulate that it's not just simply education it's also the whole ball of game that has to has to change change and and to the degree that political Consciousness and subjectivity was in a sense remade by thatcherism and and actually she really actually thought that I mean she said my task is to change the soul of the people and if I can do that that is the most important thing and she really did a good job of it as I mentioned with the in the case of the foreclosures and so revolutionary reform also would be to kind of say open up the university to the kind of stuff that we're doing open up uh the media to the kinds of things we're we're talking about open up the discussion of political subjectivity you know new kind of new kind of way because to the degree that people I think understand what is going on around them and and and and to the degree that we can on the left create a a a a non-dogmatic voice about about about transformative possibilities then it seems to me that uh we we'll have a much better better chance of uh changing things in ways which we're going to deal with uh many of the crises that exist around us and you know there are other things like a guaranteed income all those sorts of things which would it seems to me go some way towards uh alleviating the current situation but once once you move in that direction you're moving in in in an entire in other words you got to turn the neoliberal prospect around I mean okay we had the crisis of 2008 but people still think neoliberal and actually and think there's a neoliberal solution to it and in fact there is a neoliberal solution which is concentrate wealth and power even more on the upper classes they're the only ones who've come out of this crisis better off than before uh they are absolutely stinking Rich right now even more powerful than they were before in fact they've they've had a good time in this crisis they really have they've done extremely well the the oligarchy has done extremely well the people have done very badly and if people understand that formula the banks have done very well but people have done very badly why do we live in a society in which those people do very well and the rest of us do very badly that's a simple political question and if we can transform that then it seems to me that we're on a form to a reform which is kind of much more towards the Revolutionary transformation from revolutionary reforms to revolutionary transformation I would like to thank you very much Mr David Harvey for enlighting us tonight thank you very much and of course also a warm thank you to my two panelists tonight aala thank you for joining us tonight yes you want to um Saturday afternoon there's going to be a manifestation against ttip which is another sort of example of the corporate capture of the state apparatus both in Europe Europe and in the United States so if you want to join us for that manifestation you're very very welcome thank you aval for that call I uh particularly would like to extend a warm uh thank you to the people joining us on live stream of course also thanks to you for your patience and participation my name is k keep [Applause] changing e e

Channel: De Balie

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Keywords: De, Balie, DeBalie, #debalie, theater, theatre, Leidseplein, Amsterdam, politics, karl marx, david harvey, communism, talk, economy, financial crisis, Marx, socialism, kapitalism, labour, marxism, Karl Marx, capitalism, neo-liberalism, economie, Economics, euro, dollar, money, bank, banks, world, crisis, finance, financial, society, Piketty, Capital

Id: -dD0HOQ3lqg

Length: 101min 32sec (6092 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 05 2017