David Harvey Talks about the Crimes of Capitalism

for the past year we've all experienced an intense sort of political or news vertigo and I believe it's making us dumber by the day of course part of this is due to the fact that Donald Trump is president and he constantly scoops the story of the latest outrage about himself by performing yet another outrage just as we start discussing the previous one it's exhausting and brain-melting but this is also because major media organizations have all chosen to constantly chase the rabbit in a way all of us in media are complicit when we're constantly on the run it's very difficult to take stock of where we are and where we've been to take a good look at the big picture becomes a luxury that none of us seem able to afford and this is going to have serious consequences our brains are actually being altered the way we process news and information our ideas about what constitutes resistance and what constitutes tyranny in general we live in a society that doesn't study its own history I mean it's unvarnished history and often current events are analyzed in a vacuum that almost never includes the context or history necessary to understand what's new what's old and how we got to where we are we've become detached from our own reality and our own work having said all of this I thought it would be fascinating to talk to David Harvey about the Trump moment he is one of the leading Marxist thinkers in the world and an authority on Marx's Das Kapital which turned 150 years old late last year harvey is distinguished professor of anthropology and geography at the city university of new york and he was one of the pioneers of the discipline of modern geography David Harvey has a new book out it's called Marx capital and the madness of economic reason David Harvey welcome to intercepted thank you first I'm curious having now read your book how did we get Trump if I had to simplify it it would be one word alienation that you have population that's increasingly alienated it's alienated from its work process because there are not many meaningful jobs around it's been promised kind of cornucopia of consumerism and they find a lot of products that don't really work or they find themselves having to renew their phone every two years you find them having to live a lifestyle which is you know they're disillusioned and and of course they're disillusioned with the political process they realize that it's big money that buys it they're disillusioned in lots of ways and it's not only in this country a lien Aidid populations don't necessarily behave in kind of a way that would probably make sense to somebody like me they don't go to the left for example they just kind of say give me something that looks different and I think when Trump came along and said I'm gonna be your voice yeah actually you know completely trumped if I can use that term Hillary Clinton and I think the same thing you will see over the brexit vote in Britain where the metropolitan area is which are doing okay but you'll find alienated populations in those small towns where the basis of economic basis of life has just disappeared so you get this kind of real rash of neo-fascist populist right-wing kind of people who are coming along and saying listen to me listen to me I have a different answer to all of these kinds of questions and I think that that sort of thing is going on not only in this country but elsewhere do you believe that Trump has any ideology based on the actions that he's taken officially as president or the the ideas that he floats when he speaks or tweets I think he has some ideas whether it adds up to an ideology or not I mean for instance one of his ideas is to dismantle everything that Obama did I mean that's almost instinctual on his part so he has ideas an ideology I don't think he has a clear ideology but he certainly has a persona who is you know kind of it's about me me me and the narcissism is obvious but I think this is a classic sort of situation of populist leaders I mean Trump's a brand of what you know a lot of observers call his populism but Trump has multiple mantras that he sort of repeats and his favorite when he talks about his Isis is stock market keeps breaking records people's 401ks are just going through the roof he never mentions that the vast majority of workers in this country actually have no pension and are not participating in my 401 k plans the stock market is hitting an all-time high record for another and think of this eighty six times since election day and then you look at all of the money you folks are making oh I wish I could take ten or fifteen percent but I think you're not going to do that you're not gonna do that but it's getting better and better your pensions are getting bigger and bigger what is going on right now on Wall Street and with the stock market I mean clearly it is breaking records Trump is totally right the Dow is above 25,000 I mean it's it's nuts if you if you think about what's happening on Wall Street it stammers of 2007 2008 what we've seen is essentially central bank's heading to the money supply and the money has to go somewhere and it mainly goes into the stock market and of course it mainly goes into the pockets of the top one percent so actually if you look at the indices of inequality since 2007-2008 they've increased markedly not only in the United States but worldwide and so in a sense what you've done is you've run into a difficulty in 2007 2008 and you answered it by throwing money at it which has been great for the stock market and all the rest of it but as we know the incomes of ordinary people have not improved at all people's situation hasn't and hardly any of the benefits of the small recovery has been since 2007 and 2008 have gone through anybody other than the top one percent as the bondholders solution to the economic problem and the last tax cut was really bondholders charter so this has been the case in the United States that in fact the bondholders are creating an economy which is good for the bondholders if someone were to arrive here from a different universe and you were asked the question what is the the wages that workers are paid or the the money that exists in the stock market or the money that changes hands from We the People to companies like Amazon what's it based on well the dollar should be worth whatever it will buy which is you know the commodities and so on that people want and we want useful commodities and the trouble with that is that capitalism is very good at making commodities that don't work or break down or only last at two years I mean I often use this example I said I'm using my grandmother's knives and forks but if capital made things that lasted a hundred years what would he do instead it makes computers that actually don't function if they're more than about three or four years old one would like to think that capital was a rational system but it's not it's it's irrational introduces these irrationalities because that's the only way it can reproduce itself and I think again people are beginning to see that this is not exactly the good life that they thought they might have at some point down the line particularly for the mass of the population now who are indebted or and who have to pay off that debt would be a credit card debt or mortgage debt or consumer debt or this is the world we're living in we're living in a world of debt peonage in which most of the population is actually their future is foreclosed by the way in which the capital is wrapped around them this kind of thing about the good life is borrow money and then everything would be okay what about the role of Amazon Google Facebook in our lives I mean is is this something new in the evolution or devolution of capitalism I don't think it's new I just look at this historically we went through from the 1970s onwards with what we call deindustrialization the loss of industrial jobs and the loss of manufacturing jobs and the result was that unions was very strong everything gets lost so the industrialization of the manufacturing sector was one big thing now we're seeing the same thing happening in retail and marketing we're seeing it through Walmart were seeing it through Amazon was seeing it through online purchasing and we're gonna see happening in the retail sector the same thing that happened in the manufacturing sector and Sue then the question is what kind of jobs are there going to be anywhere and those places that do have the jobs are going to do what Amazon which is to say well you're not really doing anything significant you're just doing manual way but you know just packaging things and sending it out this is a rather meaningless kind of work this is what I mean about alienating kind of work I mean so here we have a real transformation in labor processes which i think is going to have a real big impact upon the American economy the example of deindustrialization and what happened to industrial communities is now going to hit the consumer centers which rely upon the retail business what is your critique or problem with the idea that competition is going to give not only consumers but nation-states the highest quality product first I would like to say what competition we've got a tremendous amount of monopoly I look at it in energy look at it in pharmaceuticals look at it everywhere and actually there's a lot of monopolies around so the competition is kind of fake competition in lots of ways and internationally of course there is some sort of level of competition going on between different nation states in terms of but notice what it does basically what you're supposed to do is to create a good business environment that's what the state is supposed to do and the better the business environment the more capital go to it so that means lower taxes again the last tax bill is very much about trying to improve the United States as a business environment so you've got to give actually money to corporations and that's this astonishing thing the corporate capital don't seem to be able to survive these days without subsidies from the public sector so in effect the public is perpetually supporting large corporations and they're not really competing they're simply using their monopoly power to assemble great deal of wealth in few hands when it comes to electoral politics in the United States what do you make of the argument that I mean first of all there was a pretty ferocious debate on the left in the United States about the 2016 elections and I think a very significant chunk even of leftist ultimately held their noses and voted for Hillary Clinton as a way of sort of voting against Donald Trump but where do you come down on these questions when it comes to electoral politics well I think where I come down is to say well we've got to organize something which is very different to an alternative on the left instead of having what I call in a sense the party of Wall Street governing in both parties sorts of things are worried about Trump is what he's doing with the environment what he might do on nuclear war best not make any more threats to the United States they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen he's totally irrational about some of those kinds of things so yes I'd rather have Hillary in but I don't want to be in a situation in which I say the only answer to somebody like Trump is Hillary because that it seems to me is going back into exactly all those problems that we hit with the first Clinton administration which was the beginning of this process of the selling out of US government to the bondholders in Wall Street so we've got to find something which is an on wall street party we've got to have a real solid good left movement which you began to see elements of that crystallizing around Bernie Sanders and the like but we need to go further than that I think Bernie Sanders identifies himself as a Democratic Socialist and yet his voting record indicates that he supported regime change in Iraq he said he would continue the drone assassination program as it existed under Obama drone is a weapon when it works badly it is terrible and it is counterproductive when you blow up a facility or a building which kills women and children sir you know what it not only doesn't do it's terrible but you're comfortable with the idea of using drones if you think you've isolated a and important terrorists yes what form of socialist would you describe Bernie Sanders as I mean is he a Marxist in your view now he's uh no no he's not a Marxist at all he's as you say a kind of social Democrats but Social Democrats have a rather long history of being rather warlike about all kinds of things and believing in things like military humanism and those sorts of issues the history of social democracy is rather tainted by all of that and so I think that there has to be a genuinely left socialist movement and I think that Sanders the more he got into sort of talking to the Millennials I think his rhetoric began to shift away from social democracy to a more socialist line so talking about a single-payer system and talking about free access to higher education what's your assessment of the current state of the Democratic Party I mean somebody like Chuck Schumer for example he's raised more money off Wall Street and almost anybody else in Congress so I mean while I rhetorically he can say some certain things I think that he's very much part of that and Nancy Pelosi also well I thank you for your question but I have to say we're capitalists and I think the leadership in the power structure within the Democratic Party is antagonistic somewhat to a kind of real socialist push and my nervousness is that they will simply have to say although the alternative to the crazy man Trump and they will get into power but that's not going to make any real difference who's gonna actually exacerbate the problems as I see it I don't see them taking on the kind of question of say a student debt and I don't see them taking on single-payer and things of that kind of questions at all the term neoliberal is thrown around so much these days by people that I think have literally no clue what neoliberal economic policy is or neoliberalism is give people a definition what what does neoliberalism mean I took it to be a political project which originated in the 1970s with the Business Roundtable and Rockefellers and everybody else which is to reorganize the economy in such a way as to restore power to an ailing capitalist class a capitalist class was in difficulties in the night late 1960s early 1970s because the worker movement was rather strong a lot of community activists the environmental were all these reform things coming through the formation of the EPA and all those kinds of things so they decided through the Business Roundtable that they were going to really try to recuperate and accumulate as much economic power as they could amounts themselves and that had a number of elements to it for example if you were faced with a situation bailing out the people or bailing out the banks you would bail out the banks and let the people struggle you would always say if there's a conflict between capital and the well-being of the people you choose capital that was the simple form of the project now some people say it's just an idea about the free market well yeah a free market dissembler personal responsibility yeah redefinition of citizenship such that a good citizen is not a needy citizen so any citizen who's needy is a bad person social services get set up to punish people as opposed to really assist them and help them well and what I often think of as as one of the most visible aspects of neoliberal economic policy is the notion of austerity measures that are imposed on economies in the global south but also in the case of Greece for instance you see this demand from the creditors that the first thing that has to go if we're to give you this debt is your social programs and the money that you would normally spend on those is going to go toward paying off either the principal or the interest on the money that is being generously lent time is that that well it's the debt peonage again you know you organize debt peonage in such a way as to lock people in and then they have to pay but you don't take the money away from the bondholders I mean in the case of Greece for example it wasn't as if anybody went after the French and the German banks who lent all that money to Greece they kind of basically socialized their debt turned it in to the IMF from the European Stability London and and all the rest of it and then made the Greeks pay well actually if the bank's made a bad judgment they should pay but they didn't and this is this neoliberal principle at work and I tend not to like the term austerity because austerity is used for that policies which are administered to the population austerity is not for capital right absolutely not for the financial institutions it's not for the top 1% so so austerity is about social programs and in fact the state has been heavily heavily involved in subsidizing capital so the banks never get hurt this is what the neoliberal order is about when you have politicians campaigning in part on this idea that they're going to reduce the debt or eliminate the debt of the US federal government what are they really talking about well this is a sort of a baseball bat which is taken to politics periodically remember Dick Cheney's saying that Ronald Reagan told us that that doesn't matter because Reagan went into debt like crazy mainly on the military side Bush also was was going into debt then the Republicans turn around when Obama comes in and said we've got to do something about their debt and that becomes the excuse to stop any kind of programs going through then we see now the Republicans are back into power what do they do they increase the debt but I had no one and a half trillion dollars or something like that I don't think there's a real issue here that what is simply is a political excuse to raise a rhetoric about indebtedness and we've got to deal with the debt on our children but then of course it's turned around and and like this last tax bill nobody cares about it when when in fact they've been bleating on about the debt for ages and ages before that but it's a political tool which you use in this particular way in a particular historical moment who owns the US debt china owns great deal of it and actually Russia owns quite a bit japan owns quite a bit and if that is a very interesting story about that if you want to know in the middle of the crisis we're in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and I IG were all kind of going din the Russians went to the Chinese and said to the Chinese let's sell all our debt in those institutions and that will crash the US economy and it would have done because actually the the holders of the debt of those institutions were primarily China and Russia China refused for a very simple reason that it didn't want the US economy to crash because it's a mainly consumer market but if Russia and China had decided at that moment to sell all of their their holdings in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and AIG the US economy would have gone down what would it look like if we were to radically reorganize u.s. society under a philosophy or an ideology rooted in Marxism or the social good was actually a priority in this country rather than sort of everyone fend for themselves what would that mean in a country as big and as populated as the United States if I put it sort of crudely I think the future of the US insofar as it has a radical future lies more with some sort of what I would call almost no an ideological anarchism I don't think that it's ready for the kind of collective endeavor that would really be required to confront the power of the Federal Reserve and find an alternative I don't think it's ready for thinking about a mass movement of some kind but will actually started to redefine how the economy works I think if there's going to be any real kind of left it's going to be a kind of socialist anarchist kind of left politics that will emerge which has you know some of many redeeming features and coming out of the Marxist history was supposed to be very hostile for anarchism but I think a great deal of appreciation for the anarchist tradition I think was in an ideological area overlap there that has something which will be distinctive to u.s. history and culture and I think we have to recognize the significance and importance of that history there's no plausible path to that short of a complete collapse of the capitalist state in the United States am I wrong well no I think that one of the things that is going on on some degree on the left is the attempt to redefine forms of governmental power if you want to call it that which alternative to the existing States ruptures and to some degree I see the the activism that's going on at the municipal level as an interesting kind of way to start to explore what those alternative structures might look like can we create democratic forms of municipal governance for example if so what kind of institutional structures would work so that people become involved become unalienated as opposed to alienated entirely from the the rather corrupt structures of government that we now have so I think there would need to be already in place the capacity of people to organize themselves into alternative structures of collective governance which are outside of the conventional forms of the state apparatus the technology that exists right now in the world is such that the world could easily be destroyed many times over by single actors in some cases United States Russia China could instantaneously destroy the the world the guns and the caliber of weapons that people have in this country are much more fierce than ever before in history and I'm not even sure that Marx or or anyone from that era would have been able to imagine the level of destruction that could be caused by one individual person with these weapons does that factor into how you think about the future and the possibilities of rebellion or transformation in society just the sheer level of destruction that could be wrought by very small groups of people yeah I mean III I don't you understand what I'm saying cuz no I understand assess with dystopian novels and everything but it's like now this guy who killed all these people in Las Vegas I mean the amount of firepower that that individual had not just in his hotel room but also in other properties I mean it's it's it's on it's like 200 years ago be unthinkable that that that one person could hold that kind of power in their hand I think that politics really has to take account of that I mean there's no such thing I mean what happened in the American Revolution couldn't happen today right what happened in the French Revolution couldn't happen today the thing that struck me about Ferguson was the sight of those militarized police I mean there's no way it seems to me that a political movement could imagine taking to the streets and storming the barricades and getting anywhere they would simply be mowed down and so therefore politics has to start to think about a kind of progressive transformation which does not involve confrontation and violence of that sort because by simple I think any movement of that sort would lose and therefore we have to think of something that is an alternative kind of movement the difficulty is that that movements which are say attempting to construct some kind of alternative will get criminalized and so we see the criminalization of environmentalists we see the criminalized as early as we saw in the Dakota pipeline kind of thing you criminalize people who are engaged in protest and then of course you have the right to go in and kill them so this is if you like the problem on the left so the left has to think of an alternative strategy and not have dreams of the Russian Revolution or the American Revolution or anything of that kind because right now it's not so much that there's one person got a finger on a button I mean if Trump pushes the button then ya know could be who talked about anything it's a very big button yes right much bigger than your model right I'm sorry so so I so that's not what worries me so much but what merit worries me about is the militarization of social control and and the intense militarization and the super militarization of it so even something like occupy which is a fairly innocent kind of affair in some way he's got treated as a criminal organization which had to be smashed even something as as elemental as that it seems to me it's not gonna really be able to do very much the closer we get to actually doing something about the real centers of political and economic power in society I think that we will be treated as criminals it's something that I've said when I've had debates with people who who say you know there's gonna be a coup in the United States that the military ultimately is gonna take over or that they're gonna build these FEMA camps etc and I've often argued with people including from my own world on the left and said you know what the state doesn't need to do any of that they don't need to build a camp to put you they're already winning that's capitalism in this country the idea that people think that it requires a finite group of fat white men smoking cigars coming up with a way to lock up all of the dissenters because of their thoughts that's that's not how that kind of a force operates it's much more ingrained in every aspect of our life yes and that's why I come back to notions of debt peonage one of the ways in which social control is exercised is to people get people so deeply in debt they cannot imagine anything in their future other than simply living in such a way as to pay off their debt and and if you kind of say what is one of the biggest checks on the radicalism of say the millennial generation it's the huge student debt that hangs around them and I think that you know cognizant of that they're not gonna rock the boat debt peonage is the order of the day for young people listening to this right now what advice would you give them about how to be better contributors to society and making a world more just like what what should young people read and what ideas should they explore as they kind of go further and further out into the world to make it better two things first while while you're being on snapchat and all the rest of it try and cultivate a circle of very close friends that you can have real communication with because there has to be some ground truth in as they sometimes say in these words as what all these abstractions which you're getting through the Internet are about and I think that by having a group sitting around a table with none of the devices on and talking and drinking or whatever you know I mean just so that you have a real human closeness and to can talk about a lot of the issues that you're encountering and I would be very much in favor and I think this has been going on a lot of forming reading groups you know 810 people sort of get together and once a week they get together and they talk about I'm not saying everybody should do capital but have reading groups of that kind so that you can discuss ideas and alternatives but I also recognize that when I talk to people who've formed those reading groups and that they're doing something significantly different from what goes on in terms of I'm not against all of the the new stuff I mean I tend to have a slightly Luddite view of some of this but but but I I'm all in favor of a lot of it but there has to be something else going on as well and that's something else is something which has to be actively constructed not not in opposition to but in as a companion to what is going on around them in the internet what a great note to end on professor David Harvey thank you very much for joining us on intercepted well thank you for these opportunities being great thank you David Harvey is distinguished professor of anthropology and geography at the City University of New York and author of many books his latest is Mark's capital and the madness of economic reason

Channel: The Intercept

Views: 67,708

Keywords: david harvey, communism, capitalism, economist, jeremy scahill, the intercept, intercepted, podcast

Id: u5zLfhGIR0c

Length: 29min 44sec (1784 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 06 2019