David Harvey on Karl Marx's Grundrisse

good day and welcome to letters and politics I'm Mitch jesurich today I'm very happy to welcome back to this radio program David Harvey David Harvey is a renowned geographer who spent a lifetime teaching and making accessible The Works of Karl Marx he has also made great contributions and critiques in the study of neoliberalism David Harvey is publishing a new book that's called a companion the Marxist grundrysa the grandrisa came from a collection of Karl Marx's notebooks that would be published several decades after his death David Harvey teaches at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York and he hosts the podcast the anti-capitalist Chronicles you can find both his works and writings at several websites including democracy at work.org and also davidharvey.org Professor Harvey it is a great pleasure to welcome you back to this program my pleasure to we're going to be talking about Karl Marx's grundry sir tell me tell me about where where this book comes from I said in the introduction it would be several decades after his death that this book would finally be published what you're writing here is a companion to that piece to help make it accessible not an easy read but but tell me what why does this book get published when does this book book get published and why why so much later after his death well this is a set of uh Preparatory notes uh that uh Marx wrote for himself and part of the problem of dealing with the text is that he's talking to himself throughout this book so it was not prepared for publication he didn't have any kind of uh audience in mind he was just talking to himself about how to understand capital and he had this project uh wrestling with uh classical political economy particularly The Works of Ricardo but also Adam Smith and Malthus and all the rest of it and that he wanted to tell us exactly how Capital worked and so he sort of sat down and just wrote to himself and and it's a kind of stream of Consciousness uh product and it of course it lay around uh unpublished for many many years but then when people started to collect together all of his writings they came across this particular writing and uh it first came out in German uh in uh sort of the end of the 1930s but uh started to make a bit of a mark and in the 1950s 1960s and uh ironically you know given Miami New York that turned out to be a German version of it uh in the New York Public Library which uh and and uh sort of uh an exile from from uh Europe uh came across a guy called rosdolski and rostolski looked at it and said my God this is full of fantastic insights even though it's also a kind of a crazy notebook and uh he he started to come up and say this is a very important text that we should look at and then the English version came out in 1973 and at that time I was just beginning to get sort of into Marx's works and I recognize that this is uh this is a very very important text but it's extremely difficult to follow because uh you know Mark you you're it's like you're going inside of Marx's brain and trying to figure out what it is that he's saying to himself and sometimes it's brilliant and clear and and other times it's just sort of turgid kind of on and on and on for pages and pages where where it's not clear at all what Marx is looking for you mentioned Roman rosdolski uh again the Ukrainian immigrant who found this tax in New York Public Library in the 1950s he was also a leading Mark scholar at the time yes yes he was but he was but he never had a uh an academic appointment uh and uh he was he was obviously very much involved in going over Marx's text but I think he was very remarkably surprised by this uh by this finding in the New York Public Library which is just up the road from where I teach which is kind of interesting what does grundry mean groundwork I think it's the background it's the I I I I think that's what the best way to look at it is the the uh the Preparatory groundwork for and for for Marx's capital and there's a there's a specific sort of relationship to what Marx actually did in capital the three volumes uh or four volumes if you include theories of surplus value and and uh the writing and the Grand Reserve but the grundrasa actually is uh more revealing in a sense because you really get to the root of how it was that Marx was trying to set up his project whereas that rootedness disappears in capital you get the results of the study not the method behind it so this is it's his last book that would be published but it's it's not his last writings no no no no no no no the there's been a big project uh which was funded in Germany during the 1950s 1960s right the way through to get all of Marx's notebooks and there are some notebooks these are from 1857 58 uh then there's the 1861-64 notebook so so uh there is a mega project or or was a magical project it's been largely suspended now of of trying to get into print everything that Marx ever wrote and uh so this was where the grundrysa came in and because it is Preparatory work because it is just basically notebooks does is does it lack a consistency or is there a consistency to it and does he present one idea that may or may not be compatible with with other ideas in it well it was interesting one student once said to me and which is which is an imaginary that sits in my mind in reading the grundrice and then teaching the grundrice and he said you know there are absolutely brilliant jewels of understanding but they're all sort of buried in a mud of kind of uh marks doing little accounting exercise exercises marks taking issue with prude all the French socialist so so it's uh it's a it's a difficult text for that reason but it does have these brilliant uh kind of interventions and when I first came across it and in fact until I actually did the the companion uh I always you would would take the the jewels and the brilliant interventions and sort of cite them and I'd never really looked at the whole structure of the Grand Reserve but it does indeed have a structure which I was very surprised to emerge during the writing of the companion and I think that structure makes his argument much more understandable and once you grasp what it's about do you see it as a distinct different work than say from Das capital uh I think it's a ground it opens the door to to that's capital and and uh you yeah and you're going through this this this doorway or this tunnel if you like uh of Revelations than than what comes out at the end is is Marx's Capital but if you read Marx's Capital without reading the grundry sir I would now say I think you probably are not going to quite get where a lot of the things are coming from in capital because with grundarisa allows you to understand the framework within which Marx was uh conducting his research before we get into what the ideas of the grundry so I want to go back to the debate that you reference with prudon and that Karl Marx would write about in in these notebooks what kind of debate do you get between socialists and I guess what around the 1850s or so um well yeah that's one of the themes in the in the grundrys one which frankly I found a bit uh tedious and a bit boring uh Marx really was in rivalry with prudhol and for the Loyalty of the French working class and I think Marx saw that rivalry and so he goes out of his way to try to discredit the thinking of proved on sometimes with valid commentary and sometimes with rather cheap shots so the kind of relationship with prudeau is is is is very much it marks his mind in writing the grand research and I tended when I came across these those passages where Marx is doing that to sort of lay it to one side and say well you know okay anybody who's interested in the difference between French socialism and what Marx came up with I think uh can have a look at uh about it in its own right but I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it um but one one of the things I would kind of comment is this Marx's theory of capital is very much infected by uh the the factory system in Manchester so it's it's the big factories and the factory and the industrial capitalism as it was developing in Britain at the time that is really the focus of Marx's interest now industrial structure in France during those years uh was very very different and in Paris which was the center of a lot of kind of working class politics and all the rest of it the typical organization was the artisan and The Artisan workshop and so the Artisan would be there uh sort of making things in the back room and then selling them in the front room on the street as it were so it was a very different industrial structure it was small scale uh the distinction between uh owners and laborers was often you know rather masked because typically the organization would be that the Artisan would be doing all of the work they would have an assistant the assistant would often be as skilled as they were so it's a very different kind of uh world of small-scale capitalist production and Pluto spent a lot of time kind of saying well the main issue uh that is affecting uh those those Artisan workers is access to credit and it's the monetary system and so on so crew don't spend a lot of time trying to revolutionize the monetary system now Marx is kind of way way beyond that and kind of said look I'm dealing with these huge factories with with uh you know hundreds and hundreds of workers in the power looms and all the rest of it and and uh mechanization is beginning to come in the power loom comes in is driving out the Artisan workers so Marx is is theorizing uh the world and the understanding of capital from the standpoint of the industrial working classes in Manchester whereas Pluto is theorizing capital from the standpoint of artisan labor in in Second Empire Paris and that to me to seems to me to be the the main difference between them and now Marx actually when he kind of recognized he was basically talking about British industrialism and Manchester industrialism in particular and he made this kind of comment that he chose to focus on that because he felt this was the image of the whole future of capitalism it was all going to be end up like Factory labor and of course we still see factories of the sort that Marx was dealing with in places like Bangladesh of course in China and so on we see them but of course there are other Industrial Systems now and if we kind of said well what kind of theory would we construct if we were sitting in Silicon Valley I think the answer would be it would be rather different from the one that Marx constructed uh so Marx himself is also located at a certain moment in the history of capitalism but is theorizing that moment and it is a very different moment from that which prudon was encountering so some substance but still mostly personal right rivalry a lot of a lot of it was was was was was personal although uh interestingly and and which is one of the things I picked up in the conclusion to the Grand Risa Marx had a great deal of faith in the self-taught auto didax and a lot of those were French and and so Marx felt that the the intellectual resources if you like of uh for a socialist project we're very strongly present in in in in France and so in some ways then when Marx is intervening and trying to say well put On's wrong follow me uh he's trying to mobilize the intellectual resources which came out of the French Revolution in 1848 and and all of our revolutionary transitions that were occurring in France so so Marx was very very very much associated with that and wanted to try to capture it and in many ways The Artisan was typically the self-taught person and when Marx was writing about the about British industrialism he was dealing with a working class 60 or 70 percent of which was illiterate so they couldn't understand what he was writing about but the other part of it was you know brilliantly kind of self-taught and and and and very literate and and and actually was far far more sophisticated as I think I would point out somewhere then then say a beginning undergraduate class in an American University uh the the typical figure of this would be somebody like William Blake uh uh William Blake was an artisan he actually wrote tract in political economy and Mark's site some of William Blake's tracks of political commentary was highly critical of uh British industrialism from the standpoint of the The Artisan labor which has been gradually misplaced by the factory worker huh you think with William Blake you think of the poetry and the paintings yeah so how you think of that but he was also a common commentator on on political economy and so you find a big section of of uh uh on the grundry series is is talking about an article by William Blake you know do they know each other oh it's Lee William black did they know each other no I don't think so yeah yeah these notebooks again that would become the the grundry sir are are written roughly a decade after the Revolutionary moment of 1848 did did that influence these notebooks is is Karl Marx looking back at those revolutions which were mostly failed revolutions and and were those revolutions about capitalism or I always kind of thought of them as revolutions against feudalism yeah so they're well there were always a working class component of it and that working class component was founded in The Artisan structure of of Paris and so uh the revolution of 1848 had that component in it but eventually it became a Bourgeois Revolution against feudalism but initially there was a strong kind of working class uh component which was very much about the kind of uh developing of communal labor Associated labor and things of that sort and of course there was a lot there were a lot of uh utopian socialists in the 1840s 1850s who were very much part of that revolutionary movement but Marx himself was in 1858 there was a a an economic crisis in 1848 and it was it's about 10 year sequences there was another one in 1858 and Marx was expecting there to be another version of 1848 but this time led by the working classes so he was expecting in 1858 and there was going to be a real kind of uh you know okay the Revolution was nigh kind of thing but he was very very disappointed because this didn't happen and suddenly he looked around him and he said well that actually is a financial and and Merchant crisis going on and there's a lot of unemployment and all these kinds of things and there's no revolutionary movement so so what am I going to do so that's when he went into the British Museum and started to plunder the British museum for all of these texts why people like William Blake but also the ricardians and and Ricardo to kind of try to better understand why how it was that capital is managing to reproduce itself in the face of what should have been a revolutionary situation so 1848 enters in but more as a kind of a well it was a disappointed and a failed Revolution where he expected there to be a more active revolution in 1858 but it didn't occur and he needed to explain why and what it was about Capital that that inhibited uh the achievement of this revolutionary transition so that is I feel like the the context of 1858 that was the those are the years when Mark's retired from active political interventions into the bearish museum to try to study how you know you know what was Capital was truly about he better understand the nature of capital it's interesting to hear this in the Grand Reserve by the way that is one of one of the biggest issues in the grundrasa is how to understand the concept of capital because the concept of capital is foundational for the reproduction of Bourgeois Society so and he feels he doesn't understand Capital so one of the big issues right throughout the grand Reser is how to understand what capital is I think we all know the the word bourgeois what precisely does it mean it means uh uh uh a property owning uh democracy in a way as the Bourgeois and and Bourgeois is based on individualism and private property and uh and uh uh form of governance that is respectful of private property and individual liberties and freedom so that's the Bourgeois uh uh slogan if if you like um you take the slogan of the French Revolution and you kind of say uh you know equality fraternity um uh equality paternity and Liberty Liberty those are the slogans of of the bourgeoisie because they because that will result in private property and and private property Foundation of course yeah yeah and the accumulation of personal wealth and and entrepreneurial Liberties and freedoms and and freedom of the press and all those all those things this says letters and politics and we are in conversation with David Harvey David Harvey teaches at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York he also hosts the podcast the anti-capitalist Chronicles you can find it both on YouTube as well as democracy at work.org and you find his own work at his own website davidharvey.org we are in conversation about a new book that he is publishing called a companion to Marx's grandrisa so I I am not going to pretend as as though uh I understand granjrisa deeply but something that I did get out of it in preparation for our work that I've found fascinating is that within it Karl Marx presents a complex View of capitalism and he doesn't ignore sort of the more extraordinary things that capitalism does in fact he kind of points these things out and writes about them before he goes in for a for a much a much harder critique yeah no he's uh it's it's it's it's a fascinating work this way I mean uh and uh it does illuminate and reach out into uh all the corners of our society and that's why I I found it so fascinating to work on because it's it's terribly relevant for our current times I mean many people will say of Marx okay he wrote this in 1858. okay it's the it's Manchester industrialism is writing about and that's that's true of course but he does it in such a way as to kind of actually universalize what capital is about and and as he universalizes it what this does is it starts to you suddenly realize my goodness that's exactly what's happening right now so this is one of the things that was fascinating for me and of course part of my tactic by the way is to always be looking for things that are being said theoretically in the grand research for which I can find some sort of series of events uh going on around me right now and say see we're going to research is predicting this is the way Capital works and we can see it at work here in New York or or there in China and this is this is this is why I found it so fascinating to to work with it at this time tell me about how he Praises capitalism in it and he says he's sees the capitalism as a progressive force uh and a civilizing force uh and and this is one of the dialectics which are coming out of the grundry so that in parties kind of writing a tract in praise and capitalism because it gets you out of a funeral kind of uh ignorance and and mysticism and leaves aside and it's it's hard-nosed and it's about the material qualities of the of uh of the world around us and it uh is prepared to look at production processes and disaggregate them and understand them on the inside so that we get modern technology and all of the the great things that can come from modern technology so so so he he's he's very appreciative so that at certain points he he is that way but then shortly afterwards he then kind of says but a lot of this is toxic and he starts talking about alienation and and and and and meaninglessness of contemporary life life under Capital so he has this double what I call Double Consciousness or most of what capital is about on the one hand it has this positive side and on the other it has this negative side and I think this is something that was came to me is terribly important to understand about What were revolutionary movements do a lot of revolutionary movements say basically well if we take power of the state and we we manage it then we can take all of these good sides of capitalism and and turn them into something that's really nice and not recognizing the toxic side of things and one of the things that happens in Revolutionary movements is everything starts off looking fine hunky-dory and all the rest of it and everybody's very happy with what's going on and the new technologies are being used and applied to to to give more free time to everybody and all those sorts of things so we find something like that and then then he will kind of say but on the other hand there's this toxic side and you see again and again within socialist movements the encounter with that toxic side and and I think that this this says well that the transition to socialism has to deal with both the positive side of things and use that but at the same time it has to confront very much the toxic side of what capital social nations are all about we'll get to the toxic side in a moment but but I just want to put out an argument that you'll hear from Pro capitalists today who will say that since we have lived under an economic system of capitalism we have collectively achieved representative democracy we have abolished slavery we've had civil rights we've had suffrages suffragist movement and and women rights you you have rights for gays lesbians transgender people people with disabilities if you think about historically it's pretty remarkable to have something like the Americans with Disabilities Act I mean on and the life expectancy is is is of the standard of living is up are are are these are these is that a false argument no it's not false argument at all I think that it but I would I would also um you know kind of say look there are many many very positive things um the idea that Capital has done it all uh not so sure uh actually it's uh capitalist Society has pushed that way but capitalist Society has always been actually partly shaped through class struggle and a lot of the good things we've got around us like say uh good national health system or something of that kind uh the achievement of uh of a class struggle uh which pushed that the fact that we have social security in this country and that we have a you know uh sort of a Better Health Care system now than I mean there's Medicare and Medicaid and all those kinds of things the fact that we have those is not because Capital came along and said no we're going to make those things no they were pushed to it they were forced to it by Cloud struggle so I think that we we have to recognize that many of the good things we have we're not donated willingly by capital they came about from these other other reasons but having said that yeah life expectancy has increased dramatically but then again this is true this is true even of Mao's China now Mao is accused of doing all kinds of dreadful things and he made some serious mistakes and was the big China famine but when Mao came to power in 1949 uh the life expectancy in China was something like 35 by the time he died it was 65. so so what what an effect is happening is of course is the new technologies and the new possibilities which capital creates could be used both uh you know to concentrate more wealth in the working in the upper classes or it could be used to spread it around and for for the rest of the people and that then depends upon this uh uh of a state of class struggle uh I think we are still living in a sense right now to the degree that we have any kind of Social Security whatsoever it's the relic of the class struggle that occurred in the 1960s which which actually pushed many of these things through and the class struggle that occurred in the 1930s when capitalism clearly clearly failed so so I I I take a more mixed view of it and kind of say well you know the class formation that has arisen is is it has has done all of those things and much of that has a lot to do with the solidarities created through class organizations like Trade union movement political parties Social Democratic and we still have that kind of verb issue around we think of the kind of the socialism of a picketti or a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or something of that kind this is sort of Social Democratic uh kind of kind of continuation of that struggle and saying you know if we struggle hard enough we can actually improve the world in a very serious way but we're not going to ever get rid of the fact and we still have the fact that of the impoverishment of the Bottom now 40 or 50 percent of the population that's still there it's still an issue and and and we look at the the class disparities that now exist in in wealth and power then and then of course uh we're looking at something that has to be corrected and has to be corrected by a political movement which unfortunately is not very active on that front right now yeah certainly certainly this is from class struggle that we get these things there's no question sometimes I wonder though where these class struggles made possible because of the abundance and prosperity that was created by capitalism because life's hard like why do we get these in the last couple hundred years and not like a 2 000 Year tradition of some of these rights that we see today and I think well maybe it's because life is it was so much harder uh then people were much more Cutthroat weren't worried maybe about somebody else they didn't know and and and and they're standing in society no I think uh you know I I I I think that we you know um the new technologies clearly the a lot of the technologies have uh come out of uh the the capitalist class what marks calls the coercive laws of competition forced and technological change to be integral to what a capitalist Society is about and that's one of the issues that is raised a great deal in the Grand Reserve and in any Capital so that Capital cannot be a stagnant kind of society it's bound to be technologically dynamic and the Technologies can be used in various ways you can get generic Technologies so if you have a steam engine you can use it to make them locomotive or you can drain you know swamps with it and so so these technologies always have positive and negative uh connotations and of course what's interesting to me is that sometimes what looks like a liberatory technology like the internet and like uh it peer-to-peer Computing and so on what seems like a a a real positive kind of thing it quickly gets turned over into a monopoly power of the big big tech companies so that you know this again is the Dynamics of of class relations and class struggle do you think this the the technological advancement that comes with this is a major driver and the the criticism then that Karl Marx has towards capitalization capitalism and that being alienation yeah well one of the things that happens with uh the new technologies is that uh you know they they can um liberate free time I'm I'm one of the big arguments that was made early on was well new technologies uh allow productivity to increase and as productivity increase is so labor has to work less and so John Stuart Mill writing about this kind of stuff but the strange thing is he says that the new technologies which should lighten the load of Labor seem to end up making the load of Labor even harder than it was before because people are tied to the machine the machine pace of the machine is set by outside you have to you know it's a Charlie Chaplin uh modern times kind of uh picture and and Marx kind of laughs at John Stewart Bill and says well well of course because the purpose of the machines is to disempower labor it's not there to liberate labor it's there to disempower labor and to the degree they can do that then it disempowers labor and in disappearing labor it actually creates more possibility for the concentration of immense quantities of wealth and power and in the upper classes so so Marx is not against technology at all but he's basically saying look look at the uses of the technology and who uses it for what purpose and the Technologies are used to to increase the profit rate the Technologies are used uh to to to somehow rather discipline labor and to disempower labor so that labor is more and worse if you like locked into a particular situation and they don't have uh the the sort of free time that we would like everybody would like to have this makes me think of the original blood eights we use the word today did somebody who is scared of technology or are incapable of using technology but the luddites were actually workers right right around this time I don't remember exact time sometime in the 19th century uh who were the machine Breakers not because they hated technology but because they were they were being disempowered by these machines yes but monks has a very interesting point about that he kind of says you know he studied that movement some and he said the interesting thing when you look at it very closely whose machines were attacked and it turned out the loud house didn't attack all of the uh indiscriminately they attacked those employers that were using the machines most barbarically to to to to disempower labor and and Mark's kind of said it took a little time for the low light movement to realize that it wasn't all capitalists that you needed to attack it was a certain group of capitalists who were using that technology those machines in a certain way so and again I think this is Mark's kind of saying something about technology which is I he never takes any technology and says it's all bad because he takes all the Technologies and said how is it used and who uses it and who gets to use it for what purpose and it if it's used as a weapon in class struggle so he he starts to talk about the way in which um you know technology is deliberately created in such a way as to disempower labor and actually this that was very interesting to me I did some research on you know what happened in Paris in the sort of 1870s something like that and there was a famous uh industrialist at the time who was famous for his Innovation and he was asked some point what's the Innovation for and he had three reasons one was he improved the productivity of the of of Labor uh the second system monetize uh production and and a super efficient way and the third one disempower labor so it was very much in the mind of a of the innovators that you wanted a form of technology that disempowered labor so so Marx is kind of uh aware of uh a lot of this and this just comes out also in the grimberry so that that technology is terribly important there's going to be very rapid technological change uh but then who gets to use it for what purpose then becomes the big question yeah David Harvey you say the grundry says important for today can you take what Karl Marx was writing about technology in the middle of the 19th century and apply it to our situation today in a perverse way uh you know he he kind of says well in in writing a critique you've got to have at least some standards which you're you're putting up there and he kind of says well basically socialism is a society in which isn't a there's abundant free time and people can do what they like and I always like the the statement Ari LeFevre made was once asked why he was a a Marxist and not an anarchist and he said I'm a Marxist so that one day we can all live like anarchists wonderful way to think about it and and Marx in a way is echoing well he's a precursor on that kind of position because he's kind of saying I I it it would be great to have more and more free time and all the new technologies are increasing the productivity of Labor and labor can actually produce the same amount of product in four days as it wants to be you know produced in in six days so you know why don't we have a you know why don't we have a four day week or something like that I'm actually he's really talking about a 10 hour day at that time you know I know but but but but he says um but then it's interesting you see you say to people look there are all these labor saving uh Innovations around and if you even ask people and say to them do you have more free time these days the answer is always comes back no I'm up to my ears I've got to do this I've got to do that all of this new technology you know it doesn't work and I have to call up the people to come and service it and I have a hard time with the telephone company and then I have a hard time so all of the new technological Wizardry in many ways pins people down to a lifestyle which is about servicing the technology so here you have a a you know labor-saving Innovations in the home uh you know everybody has gizmos and you know everybody so so actually if you kind of say to yourself do people have more time now than they did in the 1960s and I can remember the 1960s and I had a much more free time in the 1960s than I have now because the daily life has been reorchestrated around around these new technological capacities and powers and again it comes back to Marx's principle I'm not against labor saving Innovations in in the household I think they're great but when they start to actually dominate you and so that you're so busy keeping the you know the the vacuum cleaner working and uh and the refrigerator going and uh you know if you're caught up with with all of those things and and the dishwasher not leaking and and all those kinds of things if you if you if you kind of look at it you kind of say there's a downside to this this this this technological Gizmo even down own by the way and this is something that I've learned really really fascinating even even down to the way in which which these things are provided um you know when I was a kid people in working class areas were often sort of tinkering around with their cars making their old cars run and this kind of thing and they were they were you know maybe you can't do that anymore because the electronic stuff is so sophisticated you have to take it into an expert and and and it cost you a lot of money so that actually one of the things that has happening is that the servicing of the machine is is becoming such that you cannot do it yourself you have to go to an agent somewhere and you have to pay somebody and you have to pay a warranty on uh you know on on the car going wrong so if you take all the sophistication there is now in a car which is full of electronics I can't do electronics you know there's the sort of thing where you used to see you know working people tinkering with their cars in their backyard and keeping the old the old clunking thing running forever you know you don't see that anymore because you can't do it anymore because the kind of skill you need to import the so so the technology is is a bit of a trap I I suspected yeah well I suspect it's also designed just to be rep replaced every few years oh yes absolutely you know yeah you have need a new cell phone every two years and you need a new computer every two or three years you know I mean yeah yeah planned obsolescence and they they plan it in such a way that of course Little Things uh like the charger cord you would have thought have a unified charger cord that would be good for all no no no each computer has a different charge Accord so if your computer needs if you lose a charge of Court you've got to go get that form of charge really interesting to think about it the shift there because every Appliance we used to get you know 20 20 years ago or older they were all Universal yeah all plugged into the same sockets and again this is the sort of manipulation of the system that Marx does talk about in principle back then but it's very very small back then and we now have you know real this is a real real problem for all of us we can we can make profit at every one every part of the device yes and they make profit on the servicing as well that's it and there's a consequence to the environment for this Karl Marx in in the grundrisa writes about the environment tell me how he approaches capitalism in the environment well again it's this positive negative okay the positive thing is that well Capital does to quite relation to Nature is you start to recognize that you can utilize you know and the purpose of Science and understanding of the of uh the natural order if you want to call it that your understanding of that can be mobilized so that you increase your productivity and you increase the the capacity uh to do things and you you of course you need uh to uh on the negative side you need to extract more and more wealth from the bowels of the Earth so you're going to get all sorts of issues cropping up about extractivism uh how much copper is being taken out how how do you get lithium what does a lithium mine look like it's rather ugly and rather anti-ecological so we have a lot of kind of ecological kind of questions so Marx kind of says well you know on the one hand Capital allows us to start to have a very different relation to Nature and that very different in relation to Nature means that we can exploit that relation much more efficiently and effectively than was the case in the feudal period or even even in early capitalism so the effectiveness and the science and the sophistication uh is uh it means a a very distinctive relation to Nature that's the positive side and Marx talks about that as as kind of as a very signaled achievement of what capital is about the negative side is you become alienated from that which you're going to exploit and then Marx talks about you know in in in pre-capitalist society as in indigenous societies right now there is a sense in which people see themselves as integral within nature and therefore not alienated from it they they have a kind of an unalienated relation to nature but Along Comes capital and starts to objectify everything in nature and and and it then it becomes a a use value and a utility for Capital and and it means that if you like the personal relationship the love of Nature and the sensuality that's involved in in in relation to the Natural order is is this is is sort of a lost and so he talks about a loss of our our kind of sensitivities uh to the natural world and and and and it's again it's this kind of on the one hand uh you're getting more productive capacity on the other hand you're alienated from that which you're exploiting and alienation from nature starts to become a terrible kind of problem which I think most people at some point or other feel that somehow rather they're they're you know what's going on out there is something which is hostile to them instead of them being integral and and involved within it and then of course you get the fact the fact that uh capital is uh organized and circulation of capital is organized in a spiral form which is it has to grow so the total Global capital in 1950 was about nine trillion dollars and it's now more than 90 trillion perhaps 100 trillion dollars so the size of that means that the the stress uh which occurs through global warming or habitat destruction and depletion and so on all of those issues are starting to become very very significant Capital uh grows it has to grow or it dies and as it grows of course it puts more and more stress upon upon the environment so again it's that double Consciousness that comes in there is the positive side of it and you want to preserve that and you want to utilize that sensibly and so on but on the other side there is this kind of loss of kind of relation relation to a personal relation on a social relation uh to what Marx calls the metabolic relation to Nature Karl Marx did not see capitalism as the end of History meaning that this is just how it's going to be for now on uh he he saw capitalism burning itself out was it in relations to having to extract from the natural world that it's that that it was in an infinite World that it was a finite world and that eventually you were just going to run out of resources and collapse that way I think that uh that's one of the themes that uh we have to add to Marx you know I I think that uh you know he he made some some commentaries and again what Marx does in the grundrases to open a door and at open insights and the kind of metabolic relation to Nature is one of one of those issues that he that he opened to Dora says we've got to consider this very seriously but he doesn't go all the way with it at all and this oh the way I would look at it is he's opened the door for us we have to walk through the door and we now have to say what's on the other side of that door and what the problems are and and in Marx's day of course uh environmental issues we're we're we're very local it was a local pollution of water a local uh air pollution local fetids you know slums and things of that kind uh we then get Regional kind of problems like acid rain we get Global problems like global warming and habitat destruction and species Extinction and all those kinds of things we are in a different world right now on a different set of issues need to be addressed and I think that uh I'm I'm sure Marx would say yeah well of course you know I mean you that's the way the world has become then you have to have to address it so we need we need to address that but here here I think is is very one very important argument that that comes up in in the good reason quite a bit which is increasing Mass the increasing mass of product the increasing mass of capital the increasing mass of the working population the increasing increasing mass of uh extractivism and uh and mineral exploitation and so on so when you kind of say well that actually marks designed some particular laws of a motion of Capital One of the laws of motion which is important is the increasing mass and then you kind of say well what's happening with that increasing mass and you look at something like Plastics well Plastics are invented by the 1970s they started to be used in bottles and so on in 1973. now the the mass of plastic in the world has become a real big problem and I choose Plastics rather than global warming because you can see right right away that is the increasing Mass I mean when I was a kid the idea that you drank bottled waters was was ludicrous but now you know half the world District taking bottled water and then bottled water is marketed in plastic bottles and so you've got this huge kind of mass problem uh and and there are there there are times when when you know you can have an environmental problem but it's so small and it doesn't really matter that much but we've now got to a point with plastics but it's become a global problem and we've got a global problem of climate change we've got a global profit problem with habitat destruction and therefore species Extinction we've got all of those problems which arise out of the increasing mass and that's very interesting that Mars kind of says capital is not a circulatory system it's a spiral and it's a spiral it's a vicious spiral and and that then leads into this kind of real problem you cannot maintain the spiral form without actually destroying the climate you cannot maintain the spiral form without destroying uh Amazonia and all the rest of it so this is where it's not so much the capital exhaust itself it's just that Capital will create so many serious serious serious problems the only way to which we can address those problems is to actually draw back and say we have to get out of this spiral right because the spiral is locking at the end too uh expansion as Marx calls it accumulation for accumulation sake production for production sake the inevitable expansion of of everything whether he was a huge kind of problems attaching to it and we we therefore have to have an understanding of the Dynamics of capital and how the Dynamics of capital creates these situations and these problems which become unanswerable within the framework of a capitalist mode of production and that's the situation as I see it that we are now Ren and it's the kind of situation that Marx I think would be sympathetic with and look at it and say yeah that's the issue that's the issue shocking to think we've only been using plastic for 50 years yes yeah right no I 50 years and uh and and you know you've got the oceans and you see all this plastic floating around and it's it's just it's astonishing and very little of it gets uh gets recycled which is there are some techniques now of recycling which maybe will change that but right now this is a terrible and it's not only that but we you know we're all very keen about these new electronic systems you know but lithium batteries what do you do with the waste of that no every time every time you get some new thing which you think is going to solve the environmental problem [Music] and and engel's had a wonderful statement about the housing problem uh which I have actually applied to the environmental problem he kind of said you know the bourgeoisie has only one way in which it solves the housing problem it moves it around it solves the the problem of poverty in one part of the city only to find that the whole problems the rise on the other side of the city so it moves it around I argue that about the environment we think we we're solving environmental problems we're not we either put it in the air we put it in the water or we put it on the land if we take it out of the land if we take it out of the air we've got to put it in the land if we take it out of the land we're going to put it in the air so we're moving it around we're not dealing with it so rather than produce so so a lot of environmental politics are about the moving around and not really about solving the problem by actually reducing uh the basic uh forces creating creating the the dilemmas David Harvey has been our guest Again David Harvey teaches at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York he has joined us for a conversation about a book he is publishing it is called a companion to Marxist grundrysa David Harvey as usual I've enjoyed our conversation very much and I thank you for taking this time to join us today no my pleasure my pleasure and I really hope that uh companion to the grundarisa will help people understand how Capital works

Channel: Letters and Politics

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Id: s4JP20Jb2nQ

Length: 52min 44sec (3164 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023