David Harvey: The Right to the City and Urban Resistance @ Fortaleza (english)

Thank You immensely it's a great pleasure to be here and I want to say I've never had an audience quite this large before so fortaleza you do me proud I have spent much of my life working on questions of social justice and urbanization and for me I have a deep passion and concern for trying to think about a more socially just form of the city in pursuing that I am I switched positions so that I increasingly try to bring together my studies of urbanization and my studies of Marxist theory I didn't take up Marxism for very political reasons in fact I was 35 years old before I ever read Marx but when I started to read it it became clear to me that this is a very insightful way of describing the nature of the problem that we face now Marx is not that easy to read which is why I produce the two companions to Marxist capital in the hope that more people would be able to read it and understand some of the really good ideas that you can get from it I also found as an academic that I really could not understand what was going on in cities without establishing a relationship with social movements homeless organizations the right to the city organizations and so I have been an active supporter and an active participant in some of the work on the right to the city and to be honest most of the good ideas I've ever had about urbanization come from the social movements from the kind of people who spoke here just now but I felt it was my task to try to put together some of the wisdom that was coming from the social movements with some theoretical understanding of why some of these things are happening why is it that right now property capital and capital in general is expelling so many people in so many cities around the world from viable and valuable locations in fact I've heard the sorts of stories we heard here tonight in Istanbul I've heard it in many other cities in Mumbai in India I've heard it in China I've heard it in London I've heard it in almost every major city I've ever visited so why is this happening around the world and what is it that we can do to stop it and this is where Marx I think helps because what Marx does is this describe the general nature of capital and in so doing to point out some of the contradictions within capital that lead it to certain strategies of development for instance one of the things we know about capital is that it must grow in order to survive it must increase value it must expand its range and its reach so we live in a society that is committed to endless growth and if you say well how much growth the general argument would be we should be growing at least at the rate of 3% per year and if we look back historically we will see that since 1800 capital has been growing at the rate of 2.25 percent per year slightly less than the decent rate of growth which is 3% now capital has to grow for one very simple reason that capital has to work on the idea that there is profit at the end of the day and if there is going to be profit there has to be more at the end of the day the classic way in which Marx described this was that the capitalist starts the day with a certain amount of money goes into the market and buys labour power and means of production puts the labor power and means of production to work to create a new commodity then sells that commodity at the end of the day for the original amount of money plus the profit ie what Marx called the surplus value which means that there must be more at the end of the day than there was at the beginning of the day so capitalism has to expand it has to grow and then the big question is where does it grow when Marx was writing it mainly grew because the world was pretty empty it could go to North America build the new capitalism in North America it could go to Argentina it could go to Australia it could conquer India and use that as its market it could bring China in and make it the market so when Marx wrote the communist manifesto in 1848 he described the situation in which he said capital is destined to create the world market it has to make the whole world its market eventually but in 1848 there was plenty of room to expand that continued to be plenty of room to expand in 1900 and there were difficulties after that with the two world wars but during the 1950s and 1960s capital could still continue to expand across the earth in 1970 it faced a difficult problem where was it going to expand but it had a piece of good luck the Soviet empire collapsed so that was integrated into capitalism and China was integrated into capitalism but now we have the problem of China is already part of the capitalist dynamic a very central part Eastern Europe is in and Russia is in where can we expand now well the some places in Africa and some other places but by and large the ability to expand is now facing a crisis and the crisis is made very significant because the rate of growth that we have is what we call exponential or compound rate of growth now it's important to understand the character of compound growth of a classic story which we tell on this is that the person who invented the game of chess was offered a reward and the king who or whoever it was offered the reward said tell me what reward you want and the person who invented it said put one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard put two grains on the second and then double it across all of the squares so you get a sequence one two 4 8 16 32 64 128 and what you see here is a gradual curve that gets faster and faster moving upwards until after a while it goes like this como vas a team a sequence a genome you risk a foggy Doha since assess Eva men shot ascent a Vinci oito Evo SEPA Seba como es Ikuo vesic increase Mentos past and jostle aeronautical OC tone approach committee ejeta and in that chess reward scheme by the time you got to the 32nd square you had used up all the rice in the world which then posed you a problem of how do you get from the 32nd Square to the 64th square when there's no rice left essica stone daha compensated race Colo Kosygin cho problema cuando vas a Saiga nutria Jasmine Segundo cuadrado faces on a risotto doe Hosea vo no mundo intone como eco fascist odd otra josma Segundo propiedad own Omarosa sent a Quattro send que todo a whole Jacopo the only way you can do it is in fact by pledging next year's rice harvest but then you have to repledge the year after two years rice harvest then four years right harvest and by the time you get to the 64th square you've actually got close to pledging the rice harvest into infinity pasta today chaos again Jeff o da como Garrincha Asuka later food to rejoice dos dos anos against the squadron Seguin CEA's incidence Eva meant T Sega Al cuadrado numero seis NT cuatro meses yukia hunt se passe acaba de rigueur and she told the Asoka later footer para seemed an Marx was writing much of the world was open so this compounding growth could easily be absorbed but now we're in a situation where we're no longer in the early stages we're like close to the 30 second square we everything is now involved in capital accumulation in other words endless growth has become a real serious problem a real serious problem because there is no room for that endless growth but also because of the environmental consequences of that endless growth this then connects to what is going on in urbanization build its cities one of the classic examples of this was Paris after 1848 in 1848 there was a crisis of growth in capitalism and a crisis typically is a situation in which surplus labor and surplus capital are side by side but there seems to be no way to put the two back to work together again crisis of 1848 produced a revolution a working-class revolution which was eventually crushed by bourgeois action but the bourgeoisie could not find a way to put capital and labor back to work it was still in an economic crisis and then along came the nephew of Bonaparte who said well make me an emperor and I will solve the problem for you make me a dictator and I will do what has to be done to get the economy running again now he knew he would not last very long as Emperor unless he put capital and labor back to work and the way one of the key ways in which he did it was to rebuild Paris and he brought this guy Houseman to Paris to rebuild the city and if you go to Paris today you'll see much of that city that was rebuilt during this period as a way of getting out of the crisis of 1847 48 but of course what was interesting about the rebuilding of Paris was that it meant expelling the working class and the working people from the center of the city you build all the new boulevards for the bourgeoisie you expel the people the people are expelled to the periphery in other words all of the elements that you've told me about tonight were there in Second Empire Paris as part of the strategy of capital accumulation actually seizing hold of the city as a means to resolve its problems of growth the same thing happened in the United States after 1945 the big depression of the 1930s was partially solved during the Second World War by putting capital and labor back to work on the war effort but then the question arose what would happen after the war how would the United States guarantee that it not fall back into depression and the answer after 1945 was suburbanization that is you created the suburbs and not only did you create the suburbs you also built new cities in the American South and American West cities like Dallas and Los Angeles were small places in 1945 but by the time you get to 1960 they are large places metropolitan areas suburbanization highways all over the place it was a suburbanization project of the whole nation which actually brought labor and capital together in this vast expansion during the 1950s and 1960s but the development of the cities through this mechanism involved a great deal of displacement and disruption and generated a great deal of discontent particularly on the most impoverished parts of the population and racial minorities so capital was doing extremely well during the 1950s and 1960s but a large segment of the population were not doing well at all so during the 1960's there a whole series of urban rebellions in the United States Los Angeles New York Detroit different places different years but on the occasion of the assassination of Martin Luther King about 120 cities experienced uprisings against the displacements that have been going on these urban uprisings ended the whole kind of strategy of stabilizing America's growth through suburbanization and regional development now this early phase that I'm talking about of 1945 was one which was really guided by emphasizing the demand side of the economy it actually correspond 'add to the kind of economics which Marx describes in volume 2 of capital where Marx argues that you cannot depress wages of the workers and the working-class too much because if you do you will not have a market therefore it is in the interest of capital to support to some degree made more power on the part of the workers so the working-class from 1945 onwards was empowered to some degree not only in North America but also in Europe with strong political parties and with strong union organization and with strong sort of working-class mobilization unfortunately this only applied to the white working-class which meant that the white working-class suburban eyes the black population was essentially left in the cities and that was where the uprisings came from but all of this came to an end in the crisis of the 1970s where clearly you couldn't continue that solution to capitols problems so there was a radical shift in economic thinking away from demand-side analysis to supply-side analysis which in effect said we go from the scene that Marx describes in volume 1 in volume 2 sorry and we move back to the scenario that he described in volume 1 in volume 1 Marx talks about production of the surplus value and if you want to maximize that you have to crush the power of labour keep wages as low as possible keep working conditions as bad as you can possibly make them and disempower labour so we've had 40 years of attack throughout much of the capitalist world attack against the power of labour in order to favor the production of value and surplus value by capital in order to be able to crush labour you needed to make capital very mobile and the form of capital that is very mobile is money form money is like butterfly it can fly around and land here and then go somewhere else commodities move around the world much more slowly but production even is it harder to move so part of the strategy that the capitalists took in trying to discipline labour was to liberate finance capital so it could go to wherever the wages were lowest as a result of that finance capital D industrialised much of the United States and much of Europe and most of the traditional centers of working class organization financialization didn't occur by accident it was a strategy to disempower labor but in disempowering labor it also disempowered national governments who lost more and more control over capital flow all of the data from most of the country countries that are central to the capitalist enterprises show that the share of labor in national income has been declining steadily since the 1970s all of the data show that since the 1970s the rich have become much richer and the poor have become relatively poorer which is exactly what Marx would predict on the basis of the one and a volume one analysis but then this would say well what do we say about the volume two problem what happens with the market when workers have less purchasing power well one of the things you can do is to give the workers credit and then they can use their credit cards to deal with the fact that there's a lot of consumer goods out there that will not be consumed unless they have access to them now this creates a very interesting situation and I think it puts us in a in a sense to try to understand where we are right now it's against that background that we see that capital is spending much much more of its assets and its resources on urban development for instance what happened in the United States after about the year 2000 is that more and more money went into the housing market and more and more people were drawn into the housing market as a way of supplementing their income capital assisted this by creating these new debt instruments and strange-sounding things like collateralized debt obligations things of this sort so sophisticated financial instruments that were supposed to help us invest more wisely capitalist growth from the 1990s onwards was increasingly dependent upon a very rapid process of urbanization that is more and more capital was flowing into urban forms of development and this is very different from what existed in the 19th century when capital would move from say Britain to the United States to build a new economy this was capital moving around the world moving into cities and rebuilding cities on a global basis in other words planetary urbanization became one of capitols central strategies of development and we're now locked into that as a major strategy and it's very difficult to see how capital can get out of it for instance I've argued that the United States growth during the period after 2000 to 2008 was entirely driven by consumerism which was connected to the speculative activities in the housing market when that all crashed in 2008 this actually posed some very very serious problems problems in the financial system but also problems in consumption because there was no longer the consumption there and the argument Marx makes in volume 2 became very prophetic at this point because without sufficient consumption then though all of those producers who were connected to the American consumer market had a very difficult time in fact the collapse of consumption inside of the United States created a huge problem for the export industries of China and there were estimates that at the beginning of 2009 China had lost 30 million jobs in the export sector but a survey at the end of the year of net job losses in China suggested that China had lost only 3 million jobs which means that somehow or other in 2009 they actually created 27 million jobs how did they do that they did the same as Houseman had done in Paris back in the 1850s and as Robert Moses did in the United States in 1945 they went into a frantic phase of city building not only city building but city building is part of a national rebalancing of the economy by building cities in the interior of China to balance the cities which were vigorously growing in the coastal regions but the Chinese effort was a huge effort on a scale which is absolutely unthinkable they built whole new cities in Inner China which had nobody living in them they built infrastructures and of course they liberated the purchase of housing through financial aid to people who wanted to buy in other words they constructed a speculative boom in the housing market the housing prices in Shanghai were doubling every two years and while that is slowed down it is still a very rapid rate of expansion China was the only country to really manage very very strong growth an immediate wake of the crash of 2008 but that growth actually spilled over to all of those countries that were all those economies that were providing raw materials to the China urbanization project that is Chile did very well because it was sending the copper Australia did very well it was providing raw materials much of Latin America became heavily involved in the China trade providing soybeans to China when you combine that with some of your own urbanization strategies here in Brazil for instance Lula in the immediate response to the crisis of 2007 2008 said we will build a million new houses again this is a getting out of the crisis by building houses and the like and also of course increasing internal demand by the bossa familia low program this meant that Brazil felt the crisis rather in a rather shallow kind of way in fact of this during this period there was strong growth through the Andean countries like Ecuador Bolivia so the urbanization project China was a huge boost to the global economy China has consumed half of the world's cement output since 2008 half of the world's steel supply is a large proportion of the world's copper resources so there is an effect a continuation of the property boom in China that crashed in the United States so we're seeing a repeat of what happened in the United States but this time in China and the big question is what happens when the China boom crashes but capital is not only engaged in city building in China it's also rebuilding and remaking the cities of the Western world all the major cities that I've visited have property booms in place all of those property booms are about building a certain kind of city the kind of city that capital wants capital has no interest in building cities for people it only has an interest in building cities for profit so what are the profitable activities that the capitalists can engage in capitalists love mega projects they hate to be bothered with neighborhood activities so they like the mega projects of building new stadiums building new parts of the city they love projects which have a high rate of return which means building the kind of city that the rich people want to live in so capital actually builds high value housing for a limited market in fact a lot of what capital build is not actually lived in it's a very interesting thing in New York City to go around and look at all of the buildings at night and see how many of these new buildings have the lights on and the answer is a lot of them are empty because people bought the apartments as a speculation not as a place to live and when you say who are the these people well it's Russian oligarchs or it's Saudi princes or its people with vast amounts of money from Latin America who want a place in Miami or New York the same is true in London London is essentially priced out of the market in terms of available housing for the mass of the population there's a tremendous shortage of affordable and decent housing for the mass of the people and an overproduction of speculative properties for the ultra-rich there was a scandal recently about one road long road in London with many mansions on it and when somebody inquired if anybody was living in any of them it turned out they were all empty now I've encountered the same story in almost every major city that I've been to but capital builds speculative property for the upper classes but and mega-projects it loves to build mega projects on the principle of public-private partnerships in which the general rule is that the public takes all of the risk and the private takes all of the profits and the result is that the cities are being used again and again and again in the purpose of this endless capital accumulation because there's tremendous pressure on capital to find places to put its money and find places to construct profitable investment opportunities in the face of this sudden shift in the compound rate of growth now when I look at this story and I've connected it back and said you could see the same processes that you are now experiencing here in Fortaleza in Paris in 1850 in London in 1870 in the United States in 1945 you can see it in almost every city of the world right now in which capital has to make and remake cities in its own image because it has nothing else better to do but it creates an inn main form of urbanization in which the mass of the people have nowhere to live just simply so that capital can reproduce now what this leads to I think is the following conclusion that we can continue to fight all of the struggles we have to fight to try to preserve neighborhoods to pry try to prevent evictions and dislocations we can do it in a better way than we do now by combining together many different struggles of homeless people anti gentrification movements affordable housing movements and the like but what Marx teaches is at some point a rather we have to go to the root of the problem and the root of the problem is capitalism we have to find some way to transform many of the movements we are working with into an anti-capitalist movement and we have to ask some questions as to what that anti-capitalist movement would try to do one of the issues that Marx raises in volume 1 page 1 of capital is the distinction between youth values and exchange values what conventional economics teaches is that the best way and the most efficient way to get use values to people is to liberate the market process so that the exchange value system can freely function I'm old enough to remember in the 1950s being promised that global poverty would be eliminated by liberating the market I heard the same story in the 1960s and in the 1970s and it took me until about the 1980s when I'm nearly 60 years old to realize this is a total lie that actually the market system produces poverty market system produces inequality the market system deprives many people have access to needed use values market system cannot affect an OTT provide affordable housing for the mass of the population all the market system can do is to produce surplus condominiums for the very rich the market system can produce and capital in the market system cannot produce a decent house in a decent living environment for the mass of the population capital and the market system actually deprives people of access to use values it does not actually help increasingly we were not in the market 30 or 40 years ago are now commodified and put into the market what kind of society would you prefer to live in one which delivered the use value of decent housing free education free health care to everybody in the population on an egalitarian basis would you rather live in that kind of society or one which rations access to health care education housing and the like through the market system what Marx suggested is that we should limit our reliance upon the market system and capital accumulation and emphasize the provision of use-values now over the last twenty years or so what we've seen are more and more social movements emerging in cities sometimes these movements come with violent and disruptive protests and what this means is that there's a great reserve of discontent with the qualities of urban life urban life is no longer something that can be anticipated with pleasure relaxation what we're seeing as it happened in Brazil last year happened in Turkey happened in London happened in all of these things as I mentioned earlier what we see is a broad discontent with the qualities of urban life and a lot of this involves new ways of doing politics and new forms of put making political demands with conventional political parties that functioned in the past do not function very well they don't know how to answer the question of how to provide a decent life in a decent living environment to the mass of the population and of course in many instances politics is actually controlled by big money power in the United States we have the best political system that money can buy and I think that this of course means also corruptions of the media legalized corruption supreme court funk agrees to the expenditure the unlimited expenditure of personal money on electoral campaigns so one of the things we see is the emergence of even greater inequality since 2008 than existed before 2008 in other words after 2008 capital and the top 1% have done very well and the people have done very badly and the only way in which that could be changed is by having a mass movement amongst the people and one of the demands of that mass movement of the people has to be to pay careful attention to the qualities of urban life for everybody in the population to make real this constitutional engagement that says people have a right to be consulted because a lot of these movements that have occurred in the last 15 20 years have been about lack of democracy a democracy that is given over to the quest for greater levels of social justice capital cannot concede that because capital is locked in to this business of only making cities of the sort that it wants and if capital cannot address the real needs of the people then capital should go and we have to find alternative ways of structuring economic life some of which already exist around us and can be found in the organizational forms that exist in the cities this is a very critical historical moment when urbanization and what's going on in the cities becomes a key political question unfortunately we are not the only ones to realize and recognize is that because what clapper will class power is doing right now is trying to create a form of the state apparatus which is effectively going to militarize urban life and what we're seeing is actually the emergence of repressive apparatus in cities which are actually criminalizing protests criminalizing those people who are searching for an alternative basis for urban life this is where a lot of the struggle lies right now and I think that there are signs that this struggle is growing and becoming more and more significant and it's also becoming global and it's also becoming more explicitly anti capital I think what's going on right now is essentially insane and I think that the only sane way out is to try to become more and more concerned to construct an anti-capitalist movement part of that movement will be around demanding the right to the city and the right to social justice in the city part of that will be about maximizing the delivery of use-values and minimizing the exchange value power and part of it will also be about the search for democratic forms of representation and decision-making in other words it's going to involve the construction of some sort of alternative political program which moves us steadily away from the capitalist track onto something radically different and I think collectively we can do this if we pay attention both to the forms of the movement and also to the theoretical background and with that I thank my translator must have been fantastic thank you I'm generally accused of being too dialectical so it's interesting to be told I'm not the contradictions of course are derived largely from a reading of Marx the first one is between use-value and exchange-value and the way in which the commodity contains as it were these two dimensions use-value and exchange-value and one tends to exclude the other there are 17 such contradictions when I've talked about tonight which is between production and realization which is the contradiction between volume 1 and volume 2 of capital so the contradictions book is about all of those contradictions and how to understand them and what kind of politics comes out but that book is not yet - in Portuguese it will be out I think sometime next year so maybe I'll come back and talk about it next year a couple of the other in a way - other themes and the other questions the first theme is how do we operate in relationship to existing institutions of state power and existing institutions of Finance the answer is that in the existing circumstances we are in we have to think about ways to collaborate and if necessary to co-opt some of those institutions there have been situations in which a local state apparatus will work in collaboration and cooperation and partnership with the social movements unfortunately that has become increasingly rare in many of the societies I've met but it is not impossible the state is a large rambling set of different institutions some of which can be negotiated with and some of which cannot in the light of what I pointed out which is the militarization of the state management of urban affairs I think that it's vital that popular movements control the state apparatus in order to control that militarization the same issue arises with with reference to the banks there are different forms of banking there the vast investment banks now I don't know how it is here in Brazil but in the United States we have credit unions which are neighborhood credit structures there's been a long history of working-class construction of mutual aid financial institutions which have helped working people deal with emergencies or deal with crises by extending credit I'm in fact in favor of the socialization of financial institutions and at the same time I'm also in favor of exploring alternative notions of property there are alternative ways of assuring people's access to housing than through private property and home ownership even in the United States we have collective forms of property which I think produce things like what's called a Community Land Trust where the land cannot be traded and therefore you cannot speculate on it and I imagine a situation in which there is a neighborhood credit union and a Community Land Trust these institutions already exist and I think we should be using them creatively to explore alternatives and I think we should be thinking about the urban as Commons so that common property regimes become more more easily established in which new institutions of management of the urban Commons come into being outside of the state so it's not a simply a choice between state and market and between state and private property but the creation of alternative institutional arrangements to ensure people's access to use values now within this there is also the question which was posed in one of the one of the comments about exclusion I think we have to recognize that some forms of exclusion are always going to be involved for instance I would like to exclude the ultra-rich from decision-making over the city it's interesting when you say something like that people say oh but you're anti-democratic and the very rich suddenly decide they're Democrats when they spend most of their lives totally excluding anybody else from any hell any action within the city now is always going to be a struggle over who will be included and who will be excluded there is right now a politics of dispossession operating within the city I'm not opposed to dispossession of the ultra-rich what seems to me is the problem is that the rich are dispossessing us and therefore anti dispossession movements on the part of those being dispossessed become a crucial way of ensuring the dispossession of those who are doing the dispossessing if you understand it true so we should not be fearful of all exclusions okay I think that answers that question

Channel: TV Boitempo

Views: 41,571

Rating: 4.9113922 out of 5

Keywords: David Harvey, Right To The City, Marx, Capital, biggest lecture, brazil, fortaleza, social movements, resistance, capitalism, gentrification, chess

Id: vjyLWMSZ2nY

Length: 46min 21sec (2781 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/invincible_spleen]

I can't recommend his book Rebel Cities enough.

[u/[deleted]]

Everything by Harvey is great. I always recommend "Enigma of Capital" to people interested in Marxist critiques of capitalism and the process of building socialism.