Rebel Cities: The Urbanization of Class Struggle

house well uh good evening uh ladies and gentlemen and uh welcome uh to this uh public lecture my name is uh Gareth Jones from the Department of geography and we'll chair the lecture which is jointly sponsored by lsse cities and the department of geography and the environment um I should alert you at this early stage uh to the Twitter hashtag which hopefully uh you can see down in the bottom right for the multimedia Savvy uh amongst you can apparently Talk Chat and in interrogate uh the conversation uh while it is taking place it's uh my very great pleasure to introduce uh this evening speaker David Harvey uh distinguished professor at City University of New York and a good friend uh of the lsse I think every uh serious students of politic political economy and the city should be familiar uh with David's work his website um which I recommend David harvey. org modestly notes that he is the author of numerous books by my count numerous in this context means about 20 most of which are available in addition to English French Spanish Portuguese German Korean Norwegian Chinese Turkish Japanese Romanian and the list goes on the books themselves perhaps more importantly um than their various uh linguistic forms of articulation um are benchmarks um in our scholarship of the city and include social justice in the city the limits of capit to Capital the urbanization of capital the condition of postmodernity Justice nature and the geography of difference Paris capital of modernity I'm not going to go to 20 the new imperialism the Enigma of capital through writing lectures and activism David introd has introduced a rigorous understanding of Marxist theory in our analysis of the city ever aware of the connections between the economy politics and social life how the city is represented his writings for example uh around Balzac how capitalist production shapes the urban experience for which I think uh David Simons the wire um is almost a coder uh of what David was writing in the urbanization of capital about Baltimore in the mid 1980s and how political action can also shape the city contrary to our beloved Chancellor George Osborne's claim that we're all in this together and as Frederick Engles realized immediately on seeing the city of Manchester in the 1840s David's work suggests that the city under capitalism reproduces social inequality but also serves as a furnace for class struggle tonight's lecture is entitled Rebel cities the urbanization of class struggle thank you one of one of the things that uh is always intriguing me is uh how to get from Marx's abstractions to what's going on in the wire or that world and um over this last year I actually haven't been working on urbanization I've been living on the land down in Argentina and the only thing I did uh down there was uh to actually try to write up a companion volume to Marx's Capital volume two uh the lectures of which are now going on on the web and I thought I'd start with uh a little argument that Marx makes in the middle of that rather surprising volume which is not read very much uh he sets up a a very highly simplified model of what a capitalist mode of production might look like it has two classes capitalists and workers and the question is how do they interrelate in terms of the nature of the commodity exchanges they engage in uh and in particular how are supply and demand articulated in that model and Marx points out that the total demand in the system at the beginning of the day is whatever the capitalist spends on labor power I.E the wage Bill plus whatever they spend on buying means production plus whatever it is the capitalist themselves consume at the end of the day you end up with a supply which is equivalent to the total amount of the wage Bill and equivalent to the total value of the means of production uh plus capitalist consumption and there's no room for profit in that so the big question is where's the extra demand come from at the end of the day that can absorb the Surplus value that's produced and then marks asked the question can the workers Supply it the answer is obviously no because they're not in a position to supply it the only class that can supply it is the capitalist class now this produces a very peculiar economy in which the capitalist class has to supply the extra demand to absorb the extra Surplus value that is organized and produced it's a very strange economic World until you ask the question what kind of consumption are the capitalist engaging in and of course there are two kinds according to Marx there's personal consumption and there's also what he calls productive consumption which is the investment in new activity and it is the investment in New activity which absorbs the output of the day before and so Marx is fairly satisfied with that answer except that there's a Time problem and volume two of capital is all about timing and is all about temporality and the problems that arise out of temporality and it turns out the only way you can square that Circle of of putting demand and Supply and equilibrium in that two class model is for the capitalist to engage in the following practice which has a long history which is to buy now and pay later that is they use credit the only way you can square it is through credit and actually volume two is perpetually excluding the credit system from its analysis at the same time as you find a rationale right throughout volume two as to why the credit system is absolutely fundamental to how capitalism works it's not something ancillary or after the fact it's actually foundational to how the system can work and out of this there comes a very simple proposition which you do get a little bit mentioned when you get to volume three of capital which says that actually the accumulation of wealth under capitalism has to be paralleled by an accumulation of debt that there is a relationship between the two a found a fundamental relationship now there's been a lot of work done on the history of accumulation of of wealth it's very hard actually to get data on debts because you know if I lend you 50 Quid and you know where does it registered it's you know it's very hard to find it but you can see some areas of indebtedness for instance the national debt you can get data on Mortgage Debt on housing and things like that and what you do indeed see is a parallel growth in indebtedness to the growth of wealth now this led me to write a little piece which I then sent to the Wall Street Journal which of course they never published which pointed out that if the Republicans were very serious and they actually got rid of debt they would actually destroy capitalism and therefore the Republicans would do a better job of destroying capitalism than the working class had ever done and I think it's true actually really is true of course the Republicans aren't really serious about destroying debt they're just serious about destroying what remains of workingclass power and low income power and all the rest of it now that connectedness between debt creation and wealth accumulation plays a very important role in the whole history of urbanization that the history of urbanization is of course about the history of indebtedness and and and credit which is used particularly to create long-term Investments and fixed capital in the built environment and all the rest of it so there is then a very vital way in which the historical dynamics of a capital mode of production are very much connected to the way in which credit institutions and wealth creation is focused on city building and urbanization and that's one of the big themes that I tried to explore one of the essays in the last book on Rebel cities and when you look at this you see actually some very very powerful connections there's a wonderful phrase which came out of San Francisco uh Federal Reserve Bank uh looking at the recent things and it said actually looked backwards and it said oh my God you can see how the US has historically got out of Crisis it's always got out of them by building houses and filling them with things now in the book I had a little graph of of housing construction just to illustrate this before 1945 rarely was housing construction more than a million units a year most of the time it was around 500,000 units a year it oscillated a great deal up and down Strong building Cycles after 1945 the building Cycles are slightly ironed out they're still fairly fairly strong and there certain periods when it became very strong but the aggregate was no longer less than a million dollars less than a million houses a year it was somewhere between 1 and 2 million a year the top was 2 million a year and most time times it was above 1.5 million a year and you see from 1945 onwards United States was constructing somewhere between around 1.5 1.7 million new housing units per year every year until 2007 2007 it went down and now it's back at 600,000 I.E where it was in the 1930s in other words the United States and I think the Federal Reserve bank's right to say which is historically got out of Crisis by building houses and filling them with things can no longer do that it's lost that possibility and one of the big drags on the US economy everybody will acknowledge is the housing market and the difficulties in the housing market and unemployment in the construction sector and new housing starts are not going where they were before and all this kind of thing now this of course is connected to something else which is in All Along being one of my major thesis that the stability of the United States economy the macroecon IC stability of the of the US economy has very much depended upon the Dynamics of suburbanization because that's where most of the housing construction is occurring that's where most of the Surplus capital is being absorbed that's where most of the debt is being created but when you look at the process by which that debt is created you see something very interesting and again it comes back to the question of what is the relationship between the demand and the supply how does a developer actually create new housing they go to a finance year and say lend us money to build new houses so the finance year says yeah okay we'll do that so a developer gets lots of money to build tracked housing around San Diego great then what happens the track housing has to be sold if the developers are not going to go bankrupt and if the loan is not going to go sour it has to be sold so the market has to be created who creates the market it turns out the same fin aners in many instances actually lend to people to buy so in fact you get the financial institutions operating both in terms of regulating the supply and the demand a neat circle now you can see how a housing bubble will form out of that very easily and we've seen signs of housing bubbles in the 1970s and we saw them again in the 1980s and then the big one comes 2001 onwards in which a vast amount of money is being lent to developers to build and a vast amount of money is being lent to people to buy but as we know there was wage repression which Afflicted the United States after Reagan came to power and and we had reaganism and all the rest of it and so the big problem was were the people who are buying them really creditworthy well initially in the 1970s 1980s they were creditworthy but bit by bit you have to go further and further down until in the end you end up with the subprime world subprime lending but the financial cial institutions are faced with a dilemma if they don't lend subprime then the developers are going to go bankrupt so then there's an interesting class kind of question what would a financial institution prefer to do see the developers go bankrupt or see individual homeowners go bankrupt and foreclose on the homes well their class camaraderie would say well my mate the developer etc etc we can't possibly let them go under you know so well all those people out there particularly if they're an ethnic minority or this kind of stuff so here we get something which is which is happening in this in this in this Dynamic and this kind of way so that very simple model which Mark sets up I think in volume two actually helps explain where that's coming from and why that is an inevitable part of a capitalist Dynamic unless there are policy is devised by the state to prevent it happening in other words it's not because the state is lack that these things happen it's because the state is not intervening uh and recognizing the nature of the threat and cannot use its power to somehow or other prevent the development of these housing Bubbles and in fact all of the evidence from 2000 onwards was the state Powers being used to to augment those those bubbles now if you go even further and start to look at the relationship between macroeconomic development and urbanization you see some very very very strong relationships first off you will notice that a whole set of crises have occurred various in various countries in various places in various times which are found which are actually founded on the land and property markets the Japanese boom came to an end in 1990 with the crash of the land market the Swedish Banks had to be nationalized in 1992 because of excessive property uh exposure and in 1973 there was a crash of the real estate investment trusts and of course New York City then went sort of technically bankrupt in 1975 so we have all of those all of those incidents in in other words which had major influences upon macroeconomy but the thing that I find very interesting is when I went to the literature and did a big search on what's the relationship between say housing markets and macroeconomic instability and the answer was I couldn't find anything it wasn't there there's some articles coming out now but you know a couple of years ago there was hardly anything and the closest you got was a World Bank report that actually said you know secondary mortgage markets are great that is the way you could go and and and that's that and and that shows the maturity of an economy when you got set secondary mortgage markets of great depth and and sophistication so it was actually after the crash had occurred of layman Brothers they were actually advertising you know doing exactly what Layman Brothers had done uh as as so in in conventional economics then there is a tremendous problem about not integrating and understanding of the Dynamics of urbanization with the Dynamics uh of the O overall economic Trends and what we see right now is of course a moving around of the crisis uh Spain is in difficulty because they had because the banks got into difficulty through their property Market lending the same happened to Ireland so it wasn't that the state was proplate in Spain it was that that the housing market Market was proplate and therefore they had to cover that so again what we're seeing are these relationships very clearly exposed and therefore we need to to to look at them and when you look at them of course what you then see is a tremendous uh exercise of class power over the strategies of urbanization and the exercise of class power over strategies of urbanization are very much about keeping the macroeconomy alive I mean Alan Greenspan kept the interest rate low in order to prop up the housing market which kept the US economy bubbling along in 2001 2002 up until 2007 it was a macroeconomic policy that was built around doing exactly exactly that which means in effect that Capital has to control urbanization that therefore the whole history of urbanization is very much taken up with the macroeconomic stability of coordinating demand and Supply in a in in a in a dynamic economy in the kinds of ways which involve things like suburbanization now the interesting thing about this of course is that suburbanization is not so simply an economic project it's also a social and political project one of the essays I've always liked very very much was the essay by ziml on the metropolis and mental life where he talks about you know what kind of mental stance do you have to have in order to be able to live in a in a buzzing busy Metropolis you have to have a Blas attitude you have to be instrumental in your relationships with others etc etc etc in other words a whole set of mental attitudes are required a psychology if you like in order to cope with Urban living I think the same thing about suburbanization there are two things to be said about it one is that it's debt financed and it's individually debt financed and in the United States is heavily developed heavily financed by home ownership and as was said back in the 1930s debt incumbered homeowners don't go on strike so there is a fantastic measure of social control which is involved in this whole kind of development of mortgage markets when were the mortgage markets developed that was done during the Rosevelt era that's when that's when you could finally get the 30-year mortgage was in 1937 and that's and Fanny May and some other fhas were all set up in the big housing reform in the United States which uh gave access to home ownership was then supplemented after 1945 by a GI Bill of Rights which also gave access to home ownership so home ownership was seen as something which gave economic stability and brought many workers who became homeowners very much on the side of private property and capitalism in other words this is a this is an Institutional kind of shift which is is drawing more and more support but it also creates certain kind of mental attitudes hardly it's hardly surprising that actually the mental attitudes of most you know traditional suburbanites of the suburbs are changing very rapidly right now for a variety of reasons traditional suburbanites typically would vote kind of Republican or at least right-wing Democrat and that would be it hardly the sort of f ferment ferment of radical kind of politics in in in in in Suburban uh America so that there's a project there which is about class stability about continuing a process of accumulation which is occurring through the urban process incl including of course the proliferation of debts the harnessing of that debt to individuals in such a way that they have very little room for maneuver and and Hope politics that then that then goes with that so one of the things I would try to do is to look more closely at the relationship between capital and urbanization and unpack it in such a way that we can see why it is that we end up with in in New York City for example a billionaire mayor Who's In Cahoots with you know financiers and developers and has this incredible kind a program which is described as building like Robert Moses with Jane Jacobs in mind which you know you can see what that's what that's about uh who's who's fantastic at liberating spaces for condominium developments and and and all sorts of other things there are more Mega projects going on under Bloomberg than ever went on under Moses in New York City at the same time as the city itself is becoming increasingly class- divided and as the city becomes increasingly class divided so somehow or other all of these projects which from the mayor's window look great and you can be very proud of them and and say look we're rebuilding New York it's becoming this fantastic kind of place once more it's not like it was in the 1970s and 1980s where everything's falling apart and you know nobody's taking any notice of the city anymore and it's riddled with crime it's it's a great place to be well Manhattan might be a great place to be but just look at the rest of it and if you go look at some data here's the current situation New York in New York City the top 1% the famous 1 perent is earn on average on average according to income tax data $3.7 million a year individually okay $3.7 million a year there are something like 34,000 PE families or 100,000 people in New York City are trying to live on $110,000 a year half the population of New York City is living on less than $30,000 a year Well anybody who knows New York City you think of trying to live there on $30,000 a year that's what students try to do and it's not it's not easy but if you if you got if you got a family and and all of those other responsibilities that go with that it is that's that that's real hell that's the level of inequality quity that exist that's what separates the 1% from everybody else and 1% is basically Building New York in the way that it cares now if you ask the question well where where are all of those people living on less than $30,000 a year well okay some are still in Manhattan because they're still R stabilized apartments and things of that sort around but they're steadily diminishing if you want to see them you should do what I did the other day which is to come into Kennedy Airport at 6:00 in the morning and get on the E train coming in from way out in the suburbs out in Jamaica and at 6:00 in the morning the E train is packed it's absolutely packed mainly with women predominantly women predominantly women of color all looking exhausted grabbing a little bit of sleep if they possibly can going into the city to wake the city up those are the people who are earning less than $30,000 a year and they're living way way out there and as Engel said most famously about Manchester the Bourgeois has these wonderful ways of building cities so that you can actually live in them without noticing what's happening to everybody else you don't find the suits on the E train at 6:00 in the morning unless they're crazy like me and they're coming in at 6:00 in the morning and anyway if they are coming in at 6:00 in the morning they certainly don't take the E train they have the limo pick them up and take them home or whever you know no so this is a so this is the way in which New York is structured now I'm sometimes asked about well why are you why are you interested in things like the right to the city and why are you talking about Urban Revolution and and the like my argument here is well the right to the city is an empty signifier the big question is who gets to fill it with meaning and who gets to fill it with meaning right now are the condominium developers and Bloomberg and and and all of that lot they have meetings every now and again about the future of New York City and when people when picture the homeless turned up to one of these meetings and said look we would like to come in and and sit down with you all and talk about the future of the city Bloomberg simply said to them well you're very lucky coming in here this is a democratic country at least you can come in here and say that and not get arrested and so he said so well I I I would like to ask you to leave and and and maybe you know maybe maybe sometime I'll have a meeting with picture the homeless about you know your your concerns so they went outside and they hung around in the labor in in in in the just outside in the foyer of the of the hotel where this is all going on and they promtly all got arrested they don't have the right to the city the folk on the ET train don't have the right to the city so the big problem it seems to me is to then start to mobilize around gaining the the right to the city for that tranch of the population that group in the population how do you do that but then you come across a kind of interesting theoretical problem because the left often says well you know that's not really the proletariat I mean the proletariat is supposed to be in factories and and it's the factory worker and all the rest of it and yes there's a sad situation right now cuz the proletarian has disappeared it's gone to China places like that so you know there's not much we can do here cuz we don't have a proletariat anymore well I do argue with that and I think there's a relationship between the proletarian configuration that exists in cities and the Quest for the right to the city and arguments of that sort I was asked at some point by a labor union organizer how do you organize a whole city I thought it's a very interesting question I said I have the faintest idea how you organize a whole city he said well you know you're supposed to be an expert on these things why don't you sit down and think about it you know so I said all right I'd try and think about it and I had some discussions with people and and he said he was came from the union movement and he says well um you know one of the things I've been struggling with in the in in the union movement is to get them away from viewing unions as being about different sectors you know metal workers and Hospital workers and auto Auto Workers and that we should use the trades the councils the city councils trades Union councils as as organizing principles so we organize geographically and I suddenly said yeah you know that's that's interesting CU I I recall uh when I was in England around the time of the minor strike and I was in Oxford at the time and the trades Council in Oxford was an incredibly vigorous uh organization of support and the trades Council by virtue of the fact that it was not concerned with you know the Auto Workers versus the you know uh versus the municipal workers was about the the proletar of the city the trades councils were actually had a different conception and of the proletariat but also the trades councils were were often the centers of of of of radicalism which was often not as present in the conventional Union move side of the movement so organizing geographically has had actually I think a long history of success and when I started to think about well how have how have cities when have cities become centers of of political discontent it's a very interesting question obviously right now and you look at Cairo and you you look at you know even Madison Wisconsin and you look at all of this and you suddenly say well and of course then there was the Paris commune and then you suddenly start to look at a whole history of urban uprisings cord 1969 there was a Seattle general strike of 1919 and what you see emerging is a picture of the urban as being actually a viable Arena within which there can be serious class struggle waged but the thing about it is there's a great deal of heterogeneity and this is both a difficulty and an advantage you lose the homogeneity that's often required for cohesive action but you gain in the breadth of heterogeneity but you're also forced in a city to ask what is it we all have in common we know what divides us the domestic workers are over here doing this the taxi drivers are over there doing that what is it that we have in common we know we're very very different and we have different conditions of employment and and and that the restaurant workers and so on what happens if we all get together and ask ourselves the question what what are our commonalities and the the commonalities have a lot to do with the simple fact that these are the workers who produce and reproduce urban life and if we stop thinking about the production of single Commodities like cars and widgets and whatever and we started to think about all of those who produce and reproduce urban life as being the proletar not simply of our times but backwardly looking actually has always been a vigorous element in any revolutionary movement it was Central to the French Revolution it was Central in 1848 it was Central in Paris commune it was the the petrograd Soviet you just you just go on and on and on the Shanghai commune you know it just goes on and on and currently you ter Square Cairo and all the rest of it and and and so so you you see that actually that can become an organizing principle and that the city Itself by virtue of its heterogeneity and by virtue of the interconnectedness that necessarily exists in a city can also be a center of political militancy and people often don't look at that very interesting book just come out about the American Revolution and the role of the port cities in fomenting the Revolutionary spirit in the coffee shops and the you know the taverns and all the rest of it and it's now accident that you know one of the iconic events in the American Revolution was the Boston Tea Party it was focused on Boston but here what you see is very something again very similar to to to the history here you see something very interesting about what happened in the American Revolution that the Revolutionary Spirit was nurtured in the port cities but as it became more practical and started to create a revolutionary movement the cities were very vulnerable the British Navy could simply haul up and kind of threaten the city and say all right we're going to we either smash the city to bits and burn it down or you capitulate so actually the American Revolution went rural at that point it left the cities it had to because the cities were vulnerable we see that in homs right now in Syria very good example where it seems that there was a lot of radicalism being nurtured in the city and so on but it's very vulnerable so the question is then what's you know how do you how do you take that revolutionary spirit that comes from there and where does it go in terms of revolutionary movement and of course we know what happened with the Paris commune that the Paris commune is surrounded and and and and quelled and and and and and and so on but in the American Revolution it actually managed to survive particularly becoming but out of that came a certain anti anti-urban ideology in the American Revolution and the Jeffersonian vision and all of that kind of thing thing which is anti-urban so I think that history however is worth is worth recuperating and but it's worth also thinking about how we go about and in effect what you began to see at least in a little bit I saw the Occupy Movement I went on sabatical and then 10 days they later they occupied Wall Street I Think Jesus why do they have to do that you know can they why can they you know why do they have to wait until I left to do it why couldn't they done it last year you know so so so in a sense it's also using the city as a sight of struggle and trying to use the city as a strategic way uh to try to ferment a much more revolutionary kind of spirit a much more revolutionary movement and a revolutionary movement that is indeed going to reach out at some point or rather to the 99% they haven't done a terribly good job of that right now as far as I can see and you see some of the vulnerabilities I mean we had a Mayday March which was no not reported anywhere as far as I can tell but there were about 15 nearly 20,000 people on Broadway it was a very significant event uh but there were at least 5,000 police around uh which is some sign by the way of the way of the degree to which Wall Street is actually fearful of this movement gaining any traction the wall streeters know what they've done they know they're very viable very very vulnerable if the movement takes off and starts to put real serious pressure on a Democratic president he will have to start to pursue the malfant on Wall Street he really would have to start to do that that's one of the reasons why Wall Street is backing Romney so completely and so fiercely and one of the reasons why the police presence to crush the Occupy Movement in the bud before it goes anywhere has been so the repression has been absolutely fierce really Fierce so when you fight class struggle in the city you know that these tensions are likely to come out and you know that the definitions that you use on who is the proletariat and who is not have to shift and again I go back to some of the theory who produces value well the factory worker does the mine worker does the agriculture laborer does but so does the transport worker actually all those delivery trucks going around New York City are creating value and they're creating Surplus value organize the delivery workers transport strikes are extremely extremely effective we've seen that again and again organize the food chain into the city which is in effect how El Alto disciplined laaz since four three of the major rots into lapaz went through El Alto they cut the food chain the bisi had to live off canned beans for for a while these are the sorts of things that I think can really can really work there is tremendous potential political power I think when the IM workers move movement in 2006 declared May Day to be one of their days of big demonstrations in in favor of immigrant workers rights effectively Los Angeles was shut down Chicago was shut down simply because of the tremendous power that exists on the streets and in the streets we have a situation right now where the left has no money political power at all 99% I mean has almost no money power the only Power you have are people on the streets that's the only Power that exists it's the only Power that can be used and thinking of creative ways to use it to bring to attention the vast inequalities and the total unfairness of the system this is in fact the sort of thing that has to be done and is being done actually all over the world this is what was done in Argentina in 2001 2002 and continues to be done by the Picos in Argentina this is what Chilean students have been absolutely magnificent at which is occupying spaces and using those spaces as homes if you like to marud into the City and make their point and and and in the Chilean case the recent polls show that about More than 70% of the population in Chile agrees with the students the president there has approval rating around 20% and it has a lot to do with the the militancy of the students and their determination to maintain their their cause and the last thing I saw showed that extra taxes were being imposed Now by Chilean Congress on corporations in order to try to pay for uh a greater public subsidy to what should be free education but in Chile is not so these things are happening around the world and it's not only in individual cities that is the other thing I think that is impressive about this that there are networks of cities which become involved actually 1848 wasn't just Paris Frankfurt Milan Vienna 1968 wasn't just Paris it was spread throughout the urban Network I think one of the most fabulous things we've seen of this sort in recent times was the February 15th 2003 March against the war when there were about 3 million people on the streets of a Rome 2 million in Madrid 2 million in Barcelona million and a half in London how many TR how many actually were going to be in New York we never knew because the mayor said we couldn't March you can only stand on First Avenue and First Avenue got blocked and then it was illegal to stand on Second Avenue but Second Avenue got blocked and it was illegal to stand on Third Avenue but Third Avenue got blocked and nobody knew nobody knew how many people tried to get there and couldn't get there so this was a moment of simultaneity throughout the urban Network and I and I thought to myself you know it's always interesting to look at how capitalism mobilized its power Merchant capitalism mobilized its power through things like the htic league you know imagine a league of socialist cities I just have a little fantasy you know a league of socialist cities which is really pushing and there are links you know I mean we have a group now that's saying well all right participatory budgeting not the most radical thing in the world but we now have a group that's doing participatory budgeting in New York City and okay okay it's in PTO algra and it's elsewhere so there's there's communication going on around things of this kind so these These are if you like one of the ways in which we can start to rethink the role of the urban in class struggle it's not going to be easy but actually this comes back to the heterogeneity is important because most of the other movements we've had various points have broken down because they they have not embraced others in the way that a city has to embrace others if it's going to have a collective movement and the question has to be asked what is it that we all have in common in this city what is it that is going to allow us to have a voice in how this city is constructed what is it that's going to allow us to determine that you cannot keep on building all of these condominiums for the rich and palaces of enjoyment for everybody that are pretty useless you have to start to use resources to deal with the fact that so many people are trying to live as in New York City on $10,000 a year you have to try to change the Dynamics and and and use the city and create an alternative kind of City even create a more political city a city that is actually open to a kind of political negotiation across cross heterogeneities which is impossible in in the traditional Bland suburb in other words by making the world we make ourselves but we also make our politics by making our world differently so there also has to be an an alternative urbanization project it's not sufficient to kind of say well okay we just organize what it is no we have to change the cities so they become much more amenable to political political action that they become centers of political Consciousness in instead of the disruption of politics which seems to me what a lot of recent forms of urbanization have been about in other words there an interesting kind of question which actually parallels very much I think what marray bookin was asked the question that Mari ban was asking which is how do you create real political cities on the ruins of capitalist urbanization CU capitalist urbanization has been pretty ruinous for Collective politics capitalist urbanization has been ruinous for the environment it's been ruinous actually for Collective forms of action and and the development of commonalities and the commons and all the other things that that the people might value so this is I feel like one of the the central things that I think we should be questions we should be asking and I want to stress I don't have all of the answers but it's the question that has to be asked and when you ask the question that way you get get out of some of the ideas that well there's a traditional kind of left politics which is attached to some sort of notion of the Avant guard of the proletariat that's going to change history well we've got to get away from that to a different definition of who the proletar is and what it is they're about and where they're going and where they might want to go so by changing and and being flexible about those sorts of definitions I think we can also be more flexible about starting to think through what an alternative form of urbanization might look like which would be more facilitative of of political communication will be more facilitative of political activism would be more facilitative of the creation of of a world which is much more Humane and much just and at some point or other is also going to have to address the anti- capitalist dilemma how do we move away from a capitalist society that is past its due date how do we actually then start to create Alternative forms of living Alternative forms of provisioning and that is going to have to emerge it seems to me and or cannot emerge without also considering alternative modes of urbanization and alternative modes of urban living okay let me leave it there and then we can talk with some questions and see how it goes thank you so let's go to some uh some questions and who wants to okay one up there yeah um I think this it's just on one of the last points you're making uh I was just wondering whether a political project of an alternative um urbanization um perhaps ignores the fact a simple antagonism that uh the capitalists have capital and we do not well of course they have Capital but one of the one of the one of the things that we have to be sure of is to take it away from them that's what a revolutionary movement is all about now you can do it incrementally or you can do it one big bang I think that you have going to have to do it incrementally I think the possibility of doing it one big bang is not not on cards right now partly because of the instruments of Oppression and instruments of policing and militarization that they have at their command but I think that uh uh reducing the the the the the command I mean the capitalist class right now I mean those people who are earning 3.7 million doar a year basically control the political agenda in the United States and what we likely to see in the coming election is the use of money power that of A Sort you've never seen before and it's all going to be behind Romney for the reasons that I've mentioned and the only answer is going to have to be um you know Street power of some kind but on the other hand you know Obama is not you know going to be very radical either unless there is a very strong movement that's going to push him and and that well it's alul if if there is a very strong movement he can be pushed I'm sure you don't think so I think he can can be pushed but he's have to be pushed I mean see everybody will say this I mean uh uh Robert Reich was on the tube the other day and he he was in the administration and he said the welfare reform went through and he thought there would be big demonstrations against it but it became clear to him the fact there were not big demonstrations against it meant that meant that it just went through without anybody saying anything uh if there had been huge demonstrations against it uh a big chunk of the democratic party might have shrunk back but without without the outside pressure they're not going to do anything I mean I agree with you they may not do anything either even with big pressure but but with big pressure uh big pressure is a necessary but not sufficient condition for them to do something about it yeah one question just Ty really John Holloway talks about opting out of capitalism in certain ways of uh I mean a load of students meeting together in a university and reading marks somebody opening up starting off an allotment um you know all little things like that you know not working that over time do you understand for for me it's it's like a you know to break the capitalist system is more like it can also be an individual thing through like your own how do I opt out of capitalism how do I stop buying into it and I think you know and he talks about you know the stias and things like way they took control of D charta and places like that you know and and I think that's where it starts it doesn't start with because I'm I'm like you this poiter the big factory worker setup is gone it's it's changed it's moved on we're a service industry but the questions we got ask ourselves how do we opt out of it individually you know yeah I don't think uh I mean I think that's that's a a valid question but you know you know John Holloway flies airplanes around the world and does other things which are actually inside of so it's very hard to to to opt out but what you're pointing to is what I call a termite theory of political change um and I don't mean that disrespectfully because termites can do very damaging things but it's a a kind of annoying away Here There and Everywhere at some of the pillars and and and eventually they go they crumble you know and I think it's not it's it's it's it's an okay Theory of uh of of revolutionary transformation uh the only problem as we know is that uh when termite damage gets a little too obvious then uh um the uh capitalist class is likely to call in the exterminators and uh do considerable damage uh to those who engage in that practice I think in some ways the difficulty and the danger of what you're talking about is that what what capital has done is to render large segments of the population disposable large segments of the population irrelevant and to the degree that that segment of the population decides to opt out and go and look after itself capital is very grateful for you to doing that saying yeah okay good go off and you know cultivate your little dot of land and that's fine um I I don't I don't I don't mind the big the big problems arise however um when you seek and try to ask yourself the question of how can the international division of labor be so orchestrated uh so that all of us have enough to eat and we have reasonable you know material uh our material needs are are are are met and that that takes and right now that's organized of course partially through command and control structures of corporate capital and partly through Market engagements and when you start to think about Replacements of that you have to think about forms of coordination which go very far beyond uh the sort of thing uh you're you're you're talking about and those and it requires a form of of uh political organization uh that is uh not horizontal it can often be rather hierarchical and a lot of people on the left are uh are um rather hostile to that uh idea um but as I try to say well you know next time if you fly the Atlantic and you're halfway across the Atlantic and somebody says well flight traffic controllers in New York have gone into assembly mode right now and they're going to discuss which airlines should get priority Landing or something like that and you can just imagine what you would think um there are many there there are many aspects of contemporary life which are now organized in what you might call tightly coupled systems where you need command and control structures I wouldn't want my friends my my my Anarchist friends to be in charge of a nuclear power station when when the when when the lights started blinking red and yellow and all that kind of stuff uh and and I think there you have to be very careful about proposing one form of of organization to address all questions I think the uh what you're talking about is is is one aspect of a of a political strategy but it's only one aspect of a political strategy as is the termite theory of it it's one aspect of a political strategy but at some point or other it also has to be supplemented by other aspects and one of the problems I think on the left if I can pontificate on this for a moment is it's It suffers from what I call a certain fetishism of organizational forms uh that it has a certain there are certain kind of rules of organization which shall not be you know evaded or or transgressed um so I you know I I I think uh there are many aspects of what you're talking about going on there are solidarity economies emerging in much of Latin America which are doing a very good job of of connecting and and and there there are bartering structures emerging sometimes out of necessity has occurred in the wake of the um of the the big disruption Argentina 2001 2002 there are bter structures emerging in Greece right now so all of these things exist um I'm in favor of actually trying to invent new forms of money uh in Argentina they invented during the thing of bartering structure which used oxidized money I.E money that dissolved after a certain period of time which means that you had to use it to spend because if you didn't use it to spend eventually it dissolved in other words it was an anti- accumulation form of money so imagine what all those billionaires would do if they were actually given oxidized money and as I said this to a colleague and he said my God they get very fat very fast uh so so there are there are things and I and actually uh but this is this this was there by the way in kan's kan's talked seriously about stamped money uh which said that in order to maintain the value of your money at the end of the month you had to go into a post office and get a stamp on it but you had to pay for the stamp so it's a kind of it's an anti- accumulation extraction so so if you had a lot of money you had and you wanted to preserve it you had to pay a lot of money to preserve it so the more money you had the more so this this said so Kan was very interested in this because then people would have to spend money and of course he was very interested in effective demand and this is one of the way to go effective demand so you could control effective Demand by by by by controlling what how much you had to pay for the stamp certain times of year you'd have you know have to pay a lot for to to preserve your money other times a year less so you could so he was very interested in that so there are all sorts of things like that that you can start to do and start to think about and these are but I don't I don't think the solution you're proposing is one that I would say has has global global possibilities to our left mumfords the city in history the second one is a volume of essays edited by George a theodors called studies in human ecology which includes an essay which you refer to in the rebel the rebel cities on on human ecology it also includes that essay about the mental state of sub suburbanization and so and the third book I bought during fresher week coming to the LS from a a northern working class background as a Christian I don't know what else from the Arab Society bookstore during fresh as week called the essential left four classic texts on the principles of socialism Marx angles and Lenin and that was you know those three are still on my shelf now um what I I'd like to ask is having I'm afraid I only got through 40 pages on the train coming down from Yorkshire the rebel citizen I'm sorry about but um the you you seem to skip from 1848 to the Reconstruction projects of Metropolitan new New York in the post second world war period now to my reasoning one of the most fundamental transformations of the city you did refer to it in your lecture you know was the the Petersburg Soviet coming to power and ultimately to state power in the Soviet in the in Russia in 1917 now the one this by the way was edited by har lasi who considers himself a he was a professor at this school now the one classic Marxist if you want that's missing from this was Trotsky and he does feel much of my shows now he talked about combined and uneven development and he talked about the international Unity of the working class of the proletarians now can you foresee cities city states because that would seem to be the logic you know and the Greek model or something like that you know which L mford just Trace those that development of cities in different societies so that's my question really why you from 1848 to New York in 1947 thank you because for once in my life I wanted to WR a short book um you know I mean yeah I that history is very I mean that history is very interesting and I obviously been influenced throughout my life by the anarchist tradition as it's flowed into urban planning for example via Patrick gys and LS Mumford and and to some degree I'm still very intrigued by Mari Bin's views uh on on uh you know libertarian municipalism and confederations of municipalities and so on city states yeah I actually think uh mumford's ideas about bio regions and Metropolitan bio regions are actually rather interesting again this is thinking about Alternative forms of organization and I think that that's a very fun uh uh way to start to think about what alternatives might look like uh right right now so I'm I'm I'm very open to that um um I'm aware of many of these things that have occurred in between not all of them of course but but at least uh some of some of them um and I I did talk about uh the 1920s in the United States which I think was also a very interesting period when uh actually the role of uh uh of urbanization in in and there now only now beginning to be understood the role of urbanization in the creation of the the 1929 crash uh so I I do pick that up in in in here because I think it's significant uh to to give a much greater historical historical depth to it but I just really wanted to talk about contemporary situations I spent most of the time in the final part of the book as you will see talking about uh the the organization of El Alto in Bolivia and to some degree kach Bamber and bbia which have been classic examples of a form of class struggle that is waged uh on an urbanizing basis on an urban basis which has remarkable effects I mean an effect it paved the way for Morales to come to power uh and got rid of two neoliberal presidents uh within two years of each other so so I I think that these these these examples bear considerable scrutiny and and uh then the question of what kind of urban forms might might emerge out of them which have a much more much stronger political presence is is is is is kind of an open question for me but anyway there somebody there yes yes maybe we take two questions there since you're since you're sitting next to each other you can okay um my name is Peter Cooper I'm a former chairperson of Lambo trades Council so I know a bit about them but I also know a bit about Oxford trades Council and of course the point about that organization it was led very much by people who actually had came out of the car factories and had had a long Peri a long experience of uh o of of struggle if you like uh it didn't come out of nowhere uh and uh today you know we have uh hundreds of thousands of workers on strike in in the UK on the pensions okay it's fairly weak uh struggle and what have you but you know the working class is alive and well and living in the Western World although yes the industrial component of it is smaller than it used to be and it's you obviously the public sector well public sector was very big it's getting smaller uh and second the other point is I've just spent a couple of years in France where there was also a pension struggle going on uh a year or two back and which in my view uh you know sarosi wouldn't have actually lost had it not been for that pension struggle that was the decisive moment when his opinion po ratings collapsed but it was absolutely enormous compared with the pension struggle we have in the UK uh that I went on demonstration local town sorry I'll I'll be I'll be brief uh 25,000 of which there were 5,000 people demonstrating on the streets so I don't think the issue is primarily one of location to be quite honest right because I don't think the sort of it's fundamentally different France is not fundamentally different from the UK uh in that sense it's primarily a question of politics and particularly of the willingness of the unions in France to take direct action which unfortunately we are still stuck in the not the angle's model of workers fighting the employers directly in this country and not engag enging in political struggle and that's how you can bring the uh bring uh workers from different sectors together to make their power felt we have to move much more towards the French model of trade unionism it seems to me if we are going to make our impa uh for all their weaknesses and difficulties if we are going to make our power felt uh against whichever government whichever neoliberal government we're faced with uh thank you very much um I'm wondering if you would agree that one of the major problems with this with various urbanization projects like the one you are trying to to offer is its idealization or rather Romanticism um in the sense that um the idea of the city being open to everyone um being politic open for political struggle and representation and so forth um hasn't hasn't been um ever applied as as you said actually in your in your book so don't you think that such projects even if we manage to to uh apply would always be temporary um and that we have to get away from such um romantic uh projects thanks well I'm I'm not against Romanticism what's wrong with that it takes a little Romanticism to do anything you know I mean um so yeah but I I I mean I get what you're saying and I think that uh you don't well there's there's two things here one is you know the imaginary of the city has a long long history and I think uh you know you're faced with this I mean people usually ask the question well why are you talking about the right to the city what about the right to the countryside etc etc etc and I I said well you know actually LEF I think recognized way back that the distinction between City and country was disappearing and and but the city has always been uh part of our imaginary I mean has a religious meaning has all kinds of other kind of meanings attached to it and I and I don't think that it makes sense to me to give up on the collective memory that exists about what a city should be or could be or might be you know so I think you can mobilize those sentiments at the same time as you make clear that you're talk when I talk about mobilizing the food chain you're talking about bringing together all of the you know all of the elements from the countryside right the way into the city uh so so it's not it's not exclusionary of of of or any of that sort um is am I talking about an ideal Society where everybody in the city is very sort of Happily getting along the answer is no because I think that kind of City would be boring correctly and actually the point the point about city is the the heterogeneity and the conflict but through the conflict to try out of that conflict to to generate um significant change now when you look and this is what's interesting to me about El Alto the reason why for example the the kind of unions and neighborhood association meetings were always always well attended because if you didn't attend you were likely to get shafted you know and and and you know I mean for instance the Street Traders Association there'll be fights over you know who uses this piece of the so there was lot of antagonism there and because of the antagonism they came if they all came and all said happy to each other always everything's fine you know when away nobody bothered to come but they bothered to come because they had they had reason to come because if they didn't come then they suddenly find their spot had disappeared on the street and somebody else had taken it you know I mean so so the ant mechanism is actually terribly important to the dynamic uh but out of that when when when the government started to get you know do neoliberal repression all of the people knew each other even if they were in an antagonistic relationship and they dropped their antagonism and said we're not we're not taking this you know we're just going to stop it and and we're able to act as a collective precisely because they knew each other very well because they've been fighting over you know who controls this piece of you know you see what I mean so so so actually antagonism is sometimes I think I think the reason why for instance only about 30% of the you know UK population turned out to vote in in local elections last week has a lot to do with the fact there's not enough antagonism involved there's not enough at stake you know and so you got to introduce a lot more antagonism into sort of who's interested in Dopey Council meetings you know I mean it so you got to you got to inject something that really really get people kind of kind of kind kind of mobilized and we saw that by the way and I tried to say to this to the sort of Socialist Workers Party one of their most successful actions in in last time even though they've got an ideology which is rather workerist one of the most successful actions in recent years was of course their opposition to the pole tax which is an urban issue and and their mobilization against against the pole tax I think had a lot to do with Margaret Thatcher being eventually demoted I mean I think it really was very well and I kind of say to them you you you've been very successful on an urban issue so why don't you take it sort of theoretically that way and and push it even further so so um so I'm kind of I'm not a member of the Socialist Workers Party by the way in case you're thinking but but you know the point the point is that and I disagree with him about a lot of things but the point I'm trying to make here is is that but the thing about France I mean yeah well the French have different very different modes and traditions of of struggle my impression of the I I was actually there very briefly while these strikes were going on my impression was the leadership was not was rather was rather scared of what the membership wanted to do and there was a big disjuncture between the formal leadership and and the membership and the membership were out there mobilizing in the ways you're talking about and and of course when that starts to happen then then there's a kind of a qu the timidity of the leadership I think was was was a problem but that often comes out of of the nature of Trade union leadership structures that that frequently the the leadership is very is is way behind where the membership wants to be and very rarely leads a lot of the time they're about constraining the political process rather than letting it letting it Fly let's go out some yeah left and right yeah murder that joke yeah no David's pointing One Direction I bet here all right cool um so you talk a lot about sort of redefining or updating Notions of the the proletariat um uh but but the way that you talk about it still very much defines the the petarian in terms of people who produce value and workers um and um particularly you know in urban environments a non-trivial percentage of of of the population is is unemployed and sort of this disposable irrelevant um sections of the population I don't know if you've been following what's been happening in in London in terms of you know people just being forced out of the city completely not even into sort of suburban areas but just completely the other side of the country I mean is is there a way within this this redefined notion of the brara and within the sort of you know like political cities uh to to enable people who don't have access to employment to sort of opt into class struggle in some way is do you think that's possible or do you think that's that's always going to be uh it's always going to be we're never going to be able to give those people who lack that power uh any sort of uh power over their own uh lived environment yeah I I mean I didn't mention this in my talk but uh to me one of the things that's I I tend to say look there are two ways in which uh the bourjois can extract uh value from the urban situation one is by employing wage labor in the classic manner the other is by what I call accumulation by dispossession uh and there is a tremendous amount of accumulation by disposition occurring uh in urban areas people being forced out of their living quarters people being denied rights people you know so uh I think from the 1970s onwards I mean accumulation by dispossession or you know has always been a significant uh part of what capital's been about but I think that it's become much more significant uh over the last uh you know 20 30 years and if you look at the number of people who've lost their houses and the forclosures this is a this is a huge huge uh grab of of value just taking away a value which which belong to people and it's the direct value of the house but it's also the the indirect value of the of the living environment and and all the rest of it um and there's a very interesting relation ship here between where where value is produced and where it's realized and again what you find in volume two of capital is you start to recognize that value may be produced in the in in the workplace uh in the factory say but it may be realized by the retailer or by the landlord you can even make wage concessions to the worker in the workplace and then grab it back via the retailer and via the financing and the debt you know and the credit card and all that kind of stuff so so there are multiple points of extraction of wealth in which almost everybody is involved anybody who has a credit card and suddenly sees extra you know charges put on their credit card for no good reason everybody owes a cell phone and suddenly finds mysterious charges on the bottom of this their cell phone bill this is a process of extraction of value which is taking place at a different point in the circulation process than at the point of production uh so this is I think a very important component of what's going on of where wealth is being extracted out of urban life and so there's a tremendous amount of wealth extraction by landlords by service providers like you know telephone companies and all the rest of it and by uh by by financial institutions so so yes uh the answer is to the degree that everybody is caught up in that aspect of it as well as the employment aspect they are actually very much uh at the center of what I think uh class struggle in the city is going to be all about which is uh uh an attempt to roll back uh the accumulation by dispossession prevent uh the use of eminent domain for private purposes all those kinds of things going on the expulsions that are going on uh I don't know I haven't I'm sure some people have been looking what what the Olympics is usually a classic site where there's going to be a lot of expulsions going on a lot of taking away all in the name of some sort of grand kind kind of project so I'm sure that's going on I haven't you know I haven't looked into it but but I'm sure somebody has has has done that so so yes the the answer is there this is why I think the politics of it has to focus not only on the labor process and a broader notion of the labor process for example Marx insists that maintenance and repair of fixed capital is part of the value producing scheme so I point out to everybody that all those people who erect scaffolding and take it down in New York City are producing value all of the truck drivers who are taking stuff around New York City are producing value that's not generally speaking how marxists think about it but I'm saying they are producing as much value as the people in the factories are and all of the transport workers are producing value so first off the definition of who's producing value has to be expanded but secondly also this whole kind of dynamics of uh uh of of of accumulation by dispossession and then there is the kind of the whole issue of domestic work uh and and uh what how do we how do we how how do we bring in uh domestic workers for example it's a fairly sophisticated domestic workers organization in New York City that managed to get a charter passed by the New York State Assembly on uh uh the rights of domestic workers uh to limit the rate of their exploitation in in you know in family situations so again there are many forms of organization and they've now come together with other groups like the taxi drivers and the and the restaurant workers to form something called the excluded workers Congress uh so there's an attempt to build an alliance and ask the question what do we have in common even though we have very different kind of specific considerations there was a question up here there's a question up there and and then next if we can come down here yeah Jeff Powell I'm with the research on money and finance group based at at soas it's notable that you describe a New York city that is if I can simplify politically blue in the center and red in the exurbs and for those of us who just voted in the London meril elections last week we know that London still some extent is the opposite it's red in the center and blue in the suburbs and and I would fear that perhaps New York City offers London a vision of itself uh 10 or 20 years hence and perhaps in recognition of that fact one of the more interesting parts of Ken Livingston's platform was to talk about a public estate agency um a public agency that would act as a benchmark in the London property market so I wonder can we talk about people centered urbanization without talking about greater public ownership of firstly housing intermediation and secondly Housing Finance and what does that pose in terms of a challenge for a city-based uh strategy of struggle well I think the decommodification of the housing market is a necessary condition as things go on uh how that is done and by what means whether we look for the termite means where you know uh in the United States there all actually it turns out there are all sorts of ways in which Le which are legally available there's limited Equity co-ops there's land trusts there are all sorts of ways in which you can actually support the the the decommodification of of of housing it's just that that by and large the first off they're rarely they're rarely touted as being significant an important uh relative to the dream of home ownership which is constantly being promoted in the in the literature so there's no uh there's no interest in the real estate people and the real estate agents and all that whole kind of apparatus for for those forms of but they also need significant public support uh to set up a limited Equity Co-op uh you need you need uh some support from probably in getting mortgage Finance has to come from from the city council or something of that kind if the city council doesn't have the resources to do it then then then that becomes a real real problem so we need a public program of the sort that's being mentioned here to try to to try to promote those those Alternative forms of of uh of Housing Finance but I think that in the end of the day um who benefits from high property prices what you know I mean when I say that actually you can raise wages in New New York City but if the rents go up by an equal amount then nobody's better off and what it's clear is the rents are going up at a faster rate than wage rates and so we're getting an actually an economics of dispossession through through the way the housing market is uh being driven up and the housing market even even now in New York City is still going crazy I mean people are buying properties for $31 million shakes come in it's a great moment to buy for them you know you can come in and instead of paying $35 million for an apartment they pay $31 million for an apartment you know it's great savings for them um so so I and I I I I I don't know about the situation in London I imagine that's probably going on in London London London too so again the whole kind of approach to these these sorts of questions I mean the the decommodification of the housing market and and and and of course what you're seeing here also is is the is the commodification of higher education the commodification of the education you know the thing that struck me about that was so fantastic being with the students in Chile back in back in last October when I was there they clearly understood that pin was gone but what pin had implanted had got worse and the coner which was supposedly democracy had not dented pism what we're fighting in in in in Britain it seems to me is is thatcherism doubled down on what we're fighting in the United States is reaganism turned I mean he looks like a kind of progress Rive bumbling idiot compared to to to to to what's what's going on right now um and and and actually this is this is the this is the thing I mean I mean the same you see the same thing sort of way in Cairo it was in a way it was easy to get rid of Mubarak the real struggle starts now it's the whole system that lies behind it and I think what what what one of the things that I'd be concerned to is to try to get people to think systemically about what it is it's not just the pension here and it's a whole damn system that is that is that is which is called thatcherism if you like which of course Blair was part of and Clinton was was was was was part of the whole damn system which which needs to be confronted and and that is something that the Chilean students have done and I think in a remarkable kind of way and and I think uh why I I find that movement so inspiring is precisely because they understand very clearly that that is what the central issue is and they're not going to rest on on sort of being board off with this little bit and that little bit because they've been through that experience actually this the people who are fighting the at the University level now staged the high school strike of 2006 is a cohort that that staged the high school strike got betrayed by bashet and the and the Congress and knows perfectly well what it means to be betrayed and they're not going to be betrayed this time and and they that's why they're in it for the Long Haul and they know what it is they're really really battling so it's and I think that Consciousness is something which is which is which is if you like still lacking in uh in many countries that that that I've been in including of course the United States where nobody quite sees it that way but until and until it's seen that way I think we won't have a mass movement which is really going to go places uh and and do something that's uh that's radically different can we get the microphone down here then there's person at the back to the right of the camera and person down the front here and then I'm not sure how the time police are are doing are we okay okay short questions shortish answers let's let's let's take let's take three questions together and then and then I'll then I'll try and then I'll try and deal with all of them yeah Linda calls you I think this follows on very much from what you just said about the the the system because I'm I'm I'm listening to you talking about Urban Revolution and also that you're a very good friend of LSC and at the same time I'm looking at the orange Banner on the right here that says LSC cities supported by deutsche's bank and I and I'm also very well aware and I'm also very well well aware because I have looked into it of the close connection between LSC and the city of London Corporation transnational financial services and the way that LSC produces academic research and that is in Inver commas for the city of London um so I guess my question is uh are you okay with that easy answer no okay hello follow follow that at the back if you would please is it on okay um my uh my first question is how do you frame what happened in August uh via your argument and number two um when you talk about uh particularly in August well I don't want to say I don't want to say riots and I don't want to say Uprising and I don't want to say so that is number one and the second is when you talk about um examples for building upon uh capitalist ruins of urbanization I don't know if you've heard that apparently in Detroit and Pittsburgh which are these totally ruined American cities there are supposed to be incredible Collective projects but I I just want to check and see what you thought yeah there uh one more and just last question down at the front here please one one one it's a complex uh question and that is U Wall Street occupation either for another three months or having done it a couple of uh weeks earlier because you just had a sabatical um coming from from that uh specific point um I want to connect it to not just to the banner there with the Deutch bank which is more complex by the way because what a luck they pay I would think they are themselves in the do DRS much much more than uh most people here in the UK have any idea because basically they are becoming a British Bank in the moment so I don't know how you are going to handle your sovereignty if you are sitting in this particular territory so now um back to uh the questions of commodification and signification and the teaching requirements of a institution like the LSC or New York uh University um back to how do you actually design a planning process and that means not just a planning process in terms of uh totally highly coupled systems where you sit in the airplane and are quite happy that you actually are going to land even if the trades Council of the air controllers is uh having somehow different planning strategies uh which are temporary and locally whilst of course the person who sits in the plane is a globalist and thinks about global planning of emancipation that is what is the crucial task of any student at this moment to think of the global dimensions of learning how to plan and learning how to plan so that you're actually successful that you are more successful than the individual local planning of say the city Corporation of London in terms of getting rid of the tents in St Paul's or the Wall Street folks having uh per four demo demonstr One Cop kind of controlling them you just mentioned that can we have a question so how do we organize how do we organize a proper training uh structure planned in a way which is globally going to help mankind to emancipate thank you well I I came up with a uh a plan to do that and I wrote it down and um uh I took it to all the foundations and all the young people in the foundations thought it was absolutely terrific and then just simply said but our board will never ever fund it um there's a there's a battle to be fought right now it seems to me to keep spaces open inside of universities I I sometimes think people think it's an easy thing to do it's not you have to fight like hell sometimes to keep spaces open um in the face of what I think is an assault upon the independence and the you know possibilities that exist for doing alternative work inside of universities I recall at my before I went to City University of New York I was at John's Hopkins and I was we were called in and told our department was failing so we produced lots of documents to show what a great Department we were our students went to distinguished institutions and Dean just looked at us and said I'm not interested in that and he pulled a dollar bill out of his pocket he says I'm only interested in one thing and it's colored green and you're not making enough of it now this is the kind of world in which uh universities are evolving it needs to be resisted uh there are inevitably some you know compromises on and you you know where can you get some money to do something I mean I it's very and you need some the other possibility is to try to launch alternative educational structures and some of the students and this is one of the good things that happened on May 1st is uh they set up a free University in Madison Square Park and a lot of people brought their classes and they were around the the park uh many people came to give lectures and talks so it was full of it about 10,000 students went through there in the day it was actually rather kind of inspiring a student and the students were delighted that there was such positive reception for it so they're now talking about well okay can we create a free alternative University which is not only free in the sense it doesn't cost any money but is also uh freely explore exploring alternative ideas and again it's very difficult increasingly difficult to do that inside of a a University structure University system where the rewards are pushed around in other directions um the uh what did I make of last August you know there are I think uh cries for help I interpreted last August I wasn't here and so wasn't witness to it but from afar it looked to me like this was a cry for help uh I didn't I didn't see it as as an organized political uh move move move of the sort that the Occupy occupy London was or Occupy Wall Street was and and I I felt that uh again the the the difficulty with expressions of rage and and helplessness and and and sometimes you know just political uh craziness if you like those expressions uh to the degree that they actually invite police repression are count are coun counterproductive um I think to some degree the that's why I Occupy Wall Street was I think more successful than uh and I think occupy London made a a political Point more more clearly than there something like the the outbreak of of uh of of violence uh that that that occurred here but we've seen many incidents of this kind uh in France of course uh in many the suburbs and you've seen the kind of way the the political power reacts so the the way political power is reacting also is indicative of the development of a political climate in which essentially people are being viewed as disposable and if they get out of line then you you know you you you you uh blame the victim and and and and and victimize people and we've seen that happening on an increasing scale over the last 30 years so the increasing militarization of control in the city uh is something which is also has to be sort of Taken taken into account and that you're so so if you're thinking about doing something like that as an organized thing then then you've got to understand that what the political responses will likely be and and therefore it's probably a good idea to have a political strategy that does not immediately invite that response but which makes it difficult for some way for for the opposition to do uh to do its worst and the kind of thing I'm thinking of here one of the more inspiring movements in Latin America was the Madres de PL de Mayo who who got together and and simply assembled in that spot uh they got harassed they got you know pushed around they sometimes got beaten they they they just kept on coming and they came and and and they actually changed argentinan in history I think by by by the Persistence of of of their demonstrations and the questions they insisted upon asking and they still have I think considerable influence and power Al though they've been in some difficulties recently for peculiar reasons but so so there are things I think that can can can work but again one of the things I would want to say to you is this that there's a lot to be learned from the history of these struggles and how and what works and what doesn't work what the dangers are and what what the Poss possibilities are and we've not done any systematic uh I think uh study of exactly how these things work or don't work and that's what we need to do I mean I have some temporary opinions I mean my which I which I'm likely to change over the next as I as I get to know more than I more about it but the the Dynamics uh that we have to engage in as we approach these questions uh has to be I think an open dynamic in which we're prepared to let a lot of these things go on the table in which we we really we really recognize um the fluidity of the situation and and therefore calibrate our responses in terms of of developing very fluid responses rather than having you know sort of using using the the oppositional model that was was the model of 20 years ago or 30 years ago or or something of that kind we've got to be very inventive right now and I think that some the nice things that have occurred over the last uh year or two for me have been a considerable inventiveness uh which which is evident in terms of the the way the oppositional movement is is thinking about alternative possibilities and that's I think the one big hopeful hopeful sign so I guess we have to leave it there because that's it and we're out of time so I want to thank you very much for your attention thank you

Channel: LSE

Views: 45,864

Keywords: Professor, David Harvey, Class, Struggle, Urbanisation, Urbanization, city, cities, urban, capital, accumulation, fiscal, crisis, uprising, revolution, organize, mobilize, change, politics, LSE, London, School, of, Economics, and, Political, Science, London School of Economics, University, College, Public, Lecture, Event, podcast, Seminar, Talk, Speech

Id: KM9IYtgZ8Sg

Length: 99min 1sec (5941 seconds)

Published: Tue May 15 2012