RSA Replay - The Contradictions of Capitalism

hello everyone I'm Matthew time chief it was active with the RSA it's my great pleasure to welcome you to this evenings special event before we begin can I ask you to make sure your mobile phone is switched to silent we're live-streaming tonight's event as usual so welcome to web viewers the hashtag for this evenings event is RSA capital if you want to get involved in the discussion on Twitter now housekeeping notices oh it's my great pleasure to introduce this evening's distinguished speaker as I'm sure all of you will know Professor David Harvey is one of the world's leading public thinkers and its foremost Marxist scholar is a distinguished professor in the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and his online lectures are given him a huge fan base all around the world a prolific author much cited academic he's inspired a generation of radical intellectuals and we were extremely proud to have turned his last are as they talking to an RSA animate which has been viewed two and a half million times indeed I think I'm right in saying that a group of neoliberal in America tried to produce a counter animate so worried were they about your impact on the public imagination it wasn't nearly as good as the original you'll be pleased to hear so we're delighted that you've made a return visit to the RSA stage David so without further ado please join me in welcoming professor David Harvey okay the occasion of this is the publication of the book on 17 contradictions in the end of capitalism just before I was asked how many of them I was going to talk about I said all of them and they said well that gives you about two minutes per contradiction so obviously I'm not going to do that so what I thought I would do is to just give you a little flavor of how the argument works and then go to what I think are some of the more serious issues that this mode of analysis sets up this mode of analysis really derives from a couple of ideas from Marx in a sense that contradictions are underpin crises so Marx made the comment that whenever you see a crisis then it's a manifestation of the underlying contradictions and I thought it would be a good idea to sort of try to lay out what the underlying contradictions are and in particular given what's happened since 2007 2008 but also looking back he's historically but Marx also kind of argued and I go or would agree with this that crises are actually catalytic moments where when capitalism actually changes its spots and become comes out differently so they're informative moments as well as difficult moments and the difficult because they're difficult moments this also means that actually these are moments of opportunity for oppositional forces to do something different in other words in the evolutionary trajectory of capitalism there are turning points which are the crises and which way you turn and how you turn and where you go to it depends very much on the nature of the class forces that are around and human volition and accidents of history and all the rest of it so I thought it was very important to this particular moment since the crisis of 2007 2008 in a technical sense has been over since 2009 but we know very well that it's still with us and this is the way it's with us is is I think fairly simply specified some economies are doing well but their people are doing very badly some classes are doing very well while the rest are doing very badly if you look at how the top 1% has come out of the crisis it came out of it extremely well it's a much richer and more powerful now and it was in 2007 2008 while the mass of the population is still mired in very considerable considerable difficulty so in laying out these these contradictions I was mindful or that I needed to connect how these contradictions work in relationship to the actual crisis we went through and I thought it would be useful to outline the first three which are foundational contradictions in the sense that no matter what kind of capitalism you're looking at you'll always find these contradictions at work now contradictions are are tensions which can be managed in some instances or latent in other instances but what Marx talks about is how these tensions sometimes get heightened into absolute contradictions that is they move from something that's there all the time but manageable to a situation which becomes unmanageable and something radical has has to change the first crisis is the one the first contradiction is through that between yeast value and exchange value and the example I would use here it would be a house a house has a use-value many different kind of uses and we all need a shelter of some kind and accommodations a place a place to live so we can specify a host bunch of use-values about it about a house then let's look at the exchange value of the house and the exchange value has actually gone through a certain evolution historically from simply a cost of production of the house so we have to pay for the house with all the materials in it in the labor that's incorporated in it to the idea that the house is not only an object that has to be can be bought and sold but it's also a form of saving and so for many working people the most common form of saving is to have I have a house for which they owning but in recent years particularly since you know the Thatcher reforms and all the rest of it housing has also become a vehicle speculation so there's a whole kind of range of exchange-value activities which are actually actually surround the provision of this use value called housing and you have to go through those exchange values in order to to get to get to the control over the use values and what we saw in 2007 2008 of course the exchange system went extremely wonky to the point where in the United States for example for some but somewhere between four or six million people lost their access to the use value of the home they were foreclosed upon and they were in a sense forced her to go live in a motel or go live with relatives or live under a bridge or some or something of that kind because the youths value was in a sense denied to them because of the exchange value problems now what this suggests is we're in situation of this kind is that we should not necessarily believe straight out that the market system is always the best way to deliver youths values to people that if people need use values then why do we have to go through the market system there's a question here I think or which is a very very important to ask and I think it should be should be asked very clearly at this particular historical moment there are in fact ways of housing provision that don't go through the exchange value system in the way that we typically do which is through notions of homeownership individual kind of private property and the like so this tension between East value and exchange value was central to what happened in the housing crisis of 2000 and 2008 which underpinned the financial crisis then became a global crisis so so an analysis of the use value exchange value dynamics of housing I think helps us understand where that crisis came from but it's been there of course the use value exchange value dichotomy has been there all along oh it was only in 2007 2008 that it got to a point of being a massive crisis you know having historical periods when it was a massive crisis before back in the nineteen twenties in the United States back in sort of the late 1980s we had problems various countries have had problems with this as we go along so this first contradiction then is something that could be worked upon but it also delivers a political message which would you rather live in a society which actually delivers adequate youth values to everybody on our reasonably equitable basis or a society which is actually dedicated to the idea that in order to get youse values you have to participate in an exchange value system which actually ends up benefiting some people in society extremely well in other words the vast amounts of wealth were extracted and private wealth were extracted from the exchange value system that was providing housing up until 2007 2008 and I would argue well now we don't need the exchange value system to be that way we can reform it reduce its its role what we should be looking at is the provision of decent exchange of youth values to people now the same thing I think applies to many other aspects of social life which have been turned into commodities the obvious one which has been I think in the news or quite a lot lately recently is higher education why do we have to go through the exchange value system in order to develop a higher educational system in the United States where this is most advanced what you see of course is an enormous debt of a student order of a student population and you're burdening those people with debt for life however student debt is the one kind of debt you can't get out of when you declare bankruptcy the only way you can get out of it is to die and and this is a I think one of the features of which which is which is there but there's a role to indebtedness which actually you can track back in through the housing question as it was approached in the 1930s in the 1930s AXA exchange value access to housing was was limited so there were all these reforms or setting up mortgage finance and all the rest of it and one of the things that was said at the time was that debt encumbered homeowners don't go and strike so actually the whole kind of notion of homeownership and debt encumbrance II was seen as a measure of social control over a population to make sure that it did not get out of water the words it was part of a disciplinary apparatus the same thing has happened to education I would argue about education too this is something that should be like my education free right the way through I got my PhD without actually having to pay anything it was paid right the way through and this is a kind of world which people now say oh it's impossible but you say but know it once was possible we can make it possible again but if change value will only exist adequately if there is a measure of it and let's get you into the question of money now money is very difficult because it represents something well what is it repertoire as money actually represent well it's a claim on social labor and so there's a relationship between social labor which is which is in itself a social relation which is immaterial and the representation of it which is the monetary form and there's been a long history of you know the money actually having a certain autonomy from that which it represents and in any case you only have to know a little bit about theories of representation to know that representation sometimes lie as a geographer I've long had to live with the fact that maps tell you a certain truth but they also lie and if you're very clever about maps you can make them live in a very sophisticated way so the representation and the reality there's always this kind of kind of kind of gap and that's true over the relationship between value and the money form but what's happened since 1970 is that the the pinning down of the money has become as it were a central feature of public policy because we deman teletype we got rid of the metal base we got rid of the gold and silver as the base in the 1970s so now there's if you like no kind of commodity that kind of keeps us in order and we therefore have to rely rely upon social institutions to stabilize the money supply in the 1970s there was a brief period in this country in the United States a very strong inflation where it was recognized that actually therefore whoever was in charge of the money supply should be anti-inflationary then therefore get the incredible kind of fear of inflation which is dominated public policy since the 1970s onwards in fact it was a wonderful thing that happened with the release of the Federal Reserve minutes just before the Lehman crisis and I forgotten the numbers now but somebody did a word count of how many times during those weeks and in the debate between the people in the Fed was the term inflation used emit why don't I was around 185 or something like that how many times was unemployment they used 16 how many times was crisis used 5 and here's this kind of as it were convergence of thinking about inflation which has everything to do with the way the money is the fear about money escaping as it were from some sort of getting you into a vast inflation as we have indeed seen in some Latin American countries recently and historically of course and by omar germany so that the relationship between money and what it represents and how the representational form of money is being managed and what's happening to it is also a con a contradiction so if you can get monetary crises and i think what you would say about 2007-2008 is that you actually have the use value exchange value contradiction and you have the question of money and value kind of actually intermingled with each other to generate this massive kind of crisis and if so those those those two contradictions are very much involved in in in what happened there is a third contradiction which which i look at which is the relationship between private property in the state in other words you can't have exchange and you can't have exchange value of housing without having private property in housing so the kind of whole kind of question of what the relationship is between private property and state policies also comes into the picture this to me was a being a very important aspect of how the state actually deals with private property why as the states are interested in individual home ownership why is it the state actually facilitates individual home ownership as much as it possibly can again has a lot to do with this question of social stability it has a lot to do with a certain dynamics of how markets might work but there's a tension there and you know what goes on between state policies and private owners becomes a part of the tension and we see that of course in what happened in the in the crisis of 2007-2008 because in the United States these quasi public institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and of course the big insurance company AG also kind of got into real deep problems and this had a lot to do with state policies towards this sector which had evolved during the 1990s which is about promoting homeownership in populations which were ill-equipped to sustain that homeownership given their income streams so again you find this kind of tension all involved so if you wanted to uh now analyze the crises of 2007 2008 you could do so by following through these contradictions and how these contradictions work so that least you'd like if you like the flavor of the analysis and I go through many others like technological change the difficulties of not keeping supply and demand imbalance all those kinds of things so I go through a whole bunch of other contradictions but I arrive at the end of a couple of contra 3 contradictions which I think I'm Li dangerous and I want to spend the rest of time just talking very briefly about what they are the first contradiction which is I think an acute element in our current situation is the difficulty of keeping compounding growth going now compound growth is something that very few people understand for reasons I can't understand either but but the reasons the reasons with a compound growth you you go like this you go very slowly sort of developing and then and then you start to edge upwards and then it goes like goes like this so compounding growth is a very she's a logistical curve an exponential growth and exponential growth is problematic in the sense that you really don't notice it for a very long time and then you start to notice it and then before you know what's happened it's gone whoosh and got you into all kinds of difficulties I think in many ways what we've seen in the history of capitalism economic growth at the rate of about 3% compound rate of growth per annum little less than that in fact and that has been going on since about 1800 1820 or whatever now 3 percent compound growth when capital is sort of located in few cities in Britain and maybe so a few in the continent and in North America 3% compound grows into the future no problem really you've got plenty of place to expand there plenty of sectors that haven't been involved yet but it's time to get to the end of the 19th century still plenty of places to go by the time you get to 1970 however you begin to look at the world and where are you gonna go well of course there's China I would suddenly gets brought into the whole thing in the old South Asia suddenly brought into the whole thing Soviet empire collapses so Russia is brought into the whole thing so now you know grocers can become global and and and it's become far far far bigger and and and and deeper and and much greater scale than anything we've ever imagined before and we're now looking going forward at the question of how you're gonna maintain three percent compound growth on all of that everything that's going on in China everything that's going on in North America going on here how are we going to do it look at what our cities look like in 1970 and look what they look now and what you'll say is well three percent compound growth has done a radical transformation of the landscape of planet Earth a three percent compound growth going forward for the next 50 years what it's going to look like what is it going to look like and and this then turns into if it seems to me a real serious barrier that is that the capital faces are finding profitable outlets for all of that compound 3% compound growth where is it going to go what's it gonna do and I think some of the signs of what it might do are already with us in terms of what's happened over the last 30 years increasingly capital over the last 30 years has been interested in investing in asset values not in production and to degree it invest in asset values it creates bubbles asset bubbles and we've seen many of those over the last you know sort of popping bubbles all over the place over the last 20 years and it's not only asset bubbles we also see sort of regional capital flows into Southeast Asia crazy kind of way and in 1997-98 it all blew up it flows into Latin America well and then there's a crisis in Latin America then it flows somewhere else from there you know so it's very interesting just following the financial press you wonder who's gonna go bankrupt next where's the next crisis going to be which which bubble is gonna go not gonna pop and you get a bubble and it pops and everybody says well that's over but right now for it's just a property market there's there's a lot of money is flowing back into property markets doing so worldwide here in London for example you have a tremendous amount of speculative activity and in property same is true in New York and in South Paulo and Santiago and Hong Kong China has won a huge asset bubble in property market and in fact the Chinese in many ways are doing exactly what the United States did in 2000 because they're trying to expand the economy by debt financing they're not into the austerity stuff that we're into here so they're trying to expand at a very very very fast rate and but part of the expansion is this asset bubble has this asset bubble character to it so if that is the case then we're going forward what are we going to do we're gonna have more and more asset bubbles but what good does asset bubbles do the mass of the population the answer is it doesn't do anything very much at all in fact it's it creates all kinds of profound difficulties particularly since it's associated with increasing inequality because one of the things that happens if you start to actually go for asset into asset bubbles you start to live off capital gains not of incomes and incomes connected to productive activity and to the degree that you live off capital gains and capital gains are not taxed very much then the wealth get extremely wealthy most of the extremely wealthy people get all their money from capital gains and they're working off asset bubbles and so we had I said bubbles going on in the financial world in the property world and everywhere else which means that control over assets then becomes as it were one of the big big big questions and one of these assets which is crucial right now is of course intellectual property rights and what we see is actually a kind of a flow of capital into those activities where the earnings are not production not profit on production they're really rents on control over assets asset bet on asset values and we're moving more and more into society that is founded on the principle of the wrong tier or on tier economy and for the degrees are on tier economy it's not actually helping us most of us live a better life at all all it's doing is amassing more and more wealth and power in a very very very small group in the population this is if you like the real serious problem and and it's associated with the fact that we seem to be on this inflection point in the in the in the growth curve where we start to accelerate very very fast and and and to me then this raises a whole kind of questions about whether we should have a politics which is actually designed to control if you like the wrong tier and I found it ironic well you know mine Keynes back in the 1930s in precision it was over euthanasia of the wrong tier well actually the wrong tier is about to engage in the euthanasia of the producer and unless we're careful so so here here if you like is a political question of how we are going to actually go start to come back and when you connect that political question with the kind of use values that we might want to apply to people we have this kind of crazy system where there's massive amounts of money which are flowing to these one percent at the same time as we really would need massive amounts of money to flow in the other direction to sustain the life of a decent life style level for the mass of the population which is actually suffering from the consequences of one of the other contradictions which is the pace of technological change which is actually removing labor from having very much significance in the dynamics of capitalism when we get to a point where actually labor is less and less relevant we will then find this again generates this inequality - in capital and labor in which labor is much weakened and has very little political capacity for resistance against against capital and capital can then suck out all that it really wants so this is if you'd like to me one of the big big questions in what ways can we deal with this problem of compounding growth in what ways can we actually control growth even deep even engage in some sort of uneven geographical D growth of societies and so that we're no longer caught but that means we have to think of something that's not like capitalism because capitalism is founded on growth it's founded on growth because the capitalist typically starts the beginning the day with a certain amount of money and ends up the day with that amount of money plus a profit so the system is continually expanding if the system is not continually expanding then you're no longer in a capitalist system so we have to actually start to talk about what the alternatives to a capitalist system might be but I don't see there much talk about you know exactly how it could be structured and that and that's one of the things that I would hope to provoke a little bit in in what in my writing there is one final point however which is connected with this which is the the last contradiction I look at is something called Universal alienation what we see is a disconnect between the way most people are thinking and the political process we see a disconnect between people's sense of identity and the kind of jobs they do as a survey in the United States recently will show that 70 percent of the population in the United States either hates their job or is totally indifferent to its qualities and that is not uncommon at all and so we widespread a donation in the world of production in part because the path of technological change has been to remove labor from having a creative and direct involvement in the labor process and and to locate intelligence inside of the Machine and so we have not only automation but we also got artificial intelligence which is changing changing things very very very fast so in that in that light we have to start to recognize alienation now one of the deals were cut it in the way was to say to workers all right you may have a meaningless job but you're going to have a good time because I'm going to provide you all this consumer goods sort of compensated consumption as it were well some of that has happened but a lot of it becomes meaningless and so there's a lot of meaningless consumption around which I think a lot of people at certain point also recognize in the management of consumerism and consumption through through everything from you know sort of fashion and and and speedy turnover of goods and and and spectacle and all the rest of it is again a part of the story but one of the consequences of this also is the loss of institutional rules institutions that can actually pose the alternatives in creative ways particularly the institutions of labor out of this there comes what I think is for me a critical kind of question it's pretty clear from I think what's happened that there's widespread disillusionment with the political system there's widespread disillusionment with what politicians can do or say there's widespread disillusionment with the role of money power in society so you know just widespread alienation and widespread alienation is producing every now and again these eruptions and outbursts of Street anger we've seen Brazilian cities erupt this last year we saw gezi Park and Taksim Square and Istanbul we've seen of course much of local still going on and in in Cairo there was eruptions in Sweden and before that of course you had the events in London and so you see again and again and again eruptions of various kinds are of people on the street kind of just expressing intense anger with the nature of the system which means that in effect we can only face up to this particular dilemma of what to do about compound growth and how to deal with the contradictions of capitalism by some new thinking and to devise new ways of doing politics now there are lineaments of that already around was the kind of thing that was pioneered a little bit in occupy and various other things so a lot of hints of what that might be but as yet to coalesce I think into something that might be able to take on the kind of question of what would an anti-capitalist struggle look like well could it would a non capitalist society look like well you know how would a non capitalist acai economy work and at the same time how to overcome and deal with the contradictions in such a way that we lean to one side of the contradiction rather than other that is we prefer youths values to exchange values we we prefer the social value to be preserved rather than allowing the monetary form to go kind of run run run riot or we we submerge if you like the contradiction between private property in the state by talking about associated forms of of political action creation of Commons and things of that sort which have a different again an alternative way of doing politics so not only do you get out of this analysis I think a good way of understanding where crises come from of understanding how Capital uses them sometimes creatively and sometimes well to redefine itself how it provides opportunities for alternatives to be debated and discussed but it also gives you like a frame for what an anti-capitalist struggle might look like and that's what I try to define at the very end in a number of simple manifesto points at the end so that's my story I'll leave it there thanks very much thanks David I know a lot of people have questions so I've just got two or three that maybe we can go through quite quickly and then we can open it up to the to the floor so there's a certain resonance between your analysis and another book along with yours which is getting a lot of attention at the moment which is thomas piketty's book on capital and this notion this this focus on the Ranji a class on the power of asset holding what does what does that mean for where as it were the class class forces lie I mean in a sense if the problem lies with the 1% then is it the 99% versus the 1% is that what's going on or are all of us who own houses and have made lots of money out of our houses are we now on the wrong side of that divide well how does this work work it work through in terms of class interests well I think in there are two two things there first off the immense money power that is concentrated within what can be only described as a plutocracy or an area or an oligarchy has immense influence over the media as immense influence over politics democracy is now the democracy of money we see this in most advanced forms in the United States so that essentially you have the 1% or 0.1% which is able to buy elections and buy influence and power and there's pretty direct at doing so that's the first point the second point is yeah you're quite right to kind of say well you know individual home ownership just to give you take that example it's been a policy of social stability and support for capitalism from the very GetGo it's become widespread in society and therefore when people start talking about a stakeholder society or estimate you try to find ways to pin people into support of the system because it is not in their interest as it were to to give up private property the same thing applies to pension funds and and all sorts of things like that I have this am big and I'm anti-capitalist and I'm very glad to see when it gets into trouble but I go look at my pension fund and I got oh my god you know this is this is terrible so so yeah we all of us I think have that ambivalence but the the thing that's but beyond that is the the educational structure I mean education you know universities and all the rest of it it becomes so conventional in neoliberal in the way they set up and that also connects very much to this business of having to pay for your education you pay for your education you and what do you want you want a good job at the end of the day for one a good job at the end of the day you're not a troublemaker you know you you do the conventional things and and so actually there's been a tremendous way in which capital has built into society a whole set of supports for itself at the ideological level and the practical level but at the same time you know how many people are around sort of talking the way I talk for example well there aren't that many actually now this is one of the big problems and and and and and you know and I may be crazy sometimes told I'm crazy but but actually the thing that strikes me is when I went through this is a lot of the things that come out of this analysis are just straight common sense and obvious and and yet people can't get round to it because of this kind of incredible ideological baggage which is being foisted and continues to be sort of pummeled on on to us through the you know the the mainstream media which is as I said financially control a little bit further because in the in the early chapters of the book you you make the point that you don't think that the Contra ditional view of Clarke the Allegiant the Alliance applause forces being around work is anything is any longer adequate you explicitly say that so that an old notion that people might have of a kind of Marxist idea that there's the people who own the capitalist class and then there's the wage labor class and you know even even if you are middle class if you're in the end paid a wage you don't know the means of production then you're in that that's going to close that your but then you say no but housing is now a much more important thing so this is what intrigues me is that if you are for example a wage laborer in a company but you own a house which is you know you've owned your house they've got three hundred thousand pounds half million pounds in your house where do you now figure whose side are you on well I'm on the side of the revolution but who who is a couple of class now well yeah well this is not only that but who is the working crime and there's a there's far too much Marxist simplicity oversimplification of these these kinds of questions and I'm not in favor of the idea that there's a proletariat there which is the Vanguard and so on and it's particularly associated with factory labor I've been long taken the position allottee that everybody who produces and reproduces urban life is part of some sort of proletariat and they have a right to that which they have helped produce ie a right to the city so when I talk about the right to the city for example I'm talking about the right of people to have a decent life and a decent living environment in urban situations where we know that people are increasingly being forced out dispossessed marginalized and all the rest of it in order to make way for to build high-end condominiums in the United stand empty I mean you it's very interesting to be there at night and look at one of those big condo buildings and see how many lights are on and and there's hardly any Aleman so why you know we have enough empty houses in apartments in New York so whose side am I on well I'm not on side of the the speculators and and and the like and there's a good dual fluidity and who the capitalist class is and of course the role of the financier has become much more emphatic the role of merchant capital I mean the richest people in the United States now are people who set up McDonald's and Walmart it used to be the people who ran General Motors and and Ford and so on so there's been a big shift in the location of the capitalist class and you see more and more of them of course in the media and and and you know Google and Facebook and all the rest of it and and essentially they're on tears I mean how did Mark Zuckerberg become a billionaire it's because loads and loads of people got on Facebook and actually created an information stream that he could then rent out so what we created we created the value I mean this is very interesting we created the value and he appropriated as rent and so he's a billionaire on the basis of our labor and it was our labor that did it if nobody who ever went on Facebook he well he wouldn't have any money you know he wouldn't have anything but he's got what he's got because we are there supporting it and doing the labor so you know so it is a common or complicated situation right now just before I do and just turn from the first part of the book to the last part and also another kind of classic question that marketers get asked which is you you you talk about alternatives and you talk about our system which is irrational which is based on need which is planned but in many ways as much as there is a crisis of capitalism contradictions of coverage there's also contradiction of large bureaucracies of the state and a massive loss of confidence in the capacity of large institutions that large institutions can't cope with the pace of change in the modern world the change happens more quickly outside these institutions that happen within it so the feasibility therefore of this kind of benign democratic authority organizing things on a more rational basis notwithstanding the historical record there which isn't particularly good the credibility of this prescription becomes ever more problematic I'm not you know I'm not in favor of quote the state . I think there's no way you could have a society in the future which didn't have something that looked like a state and acted like a state and and that and and there are lots of questions to be posed about it but obviously there are some aspects in this state that work reasonably well I mean last time I looked sewage system continued to work the water system determine what our needs are no no no no there's a very interesting kind of idea of goes back to sanity Moniz kind of says well the state should be concerned with the management of things not of people and I think that is a very important distinction and I think that you know what what people do is something that in a way is not the state's business what the state's business is is to actually make sure the things that people need to do what they want to do are there for them to use that is clean water for example and decent sewage just obvious example so the state I think should be into the management of things what people do should be determined in another way and again that has to be done collective it has to be collective mechanisms I try to do this and this is one of the things at least the you know in protoform we saw with the assembly forms that were being set up around around occupy and and it's possible to start to think of assemblies for a whole metropolitan region and even get a whole series of assemblies various kinds and you see experiments with this and participate ory budgeting structures which are you know not nothing really profound about that but but you can see new ways of doing politics and new ways in which people can express themselves and and and I'm more in favor of of that diversity pursuing there but when they turn around and kind of say okay where's the words of clean water and you know that's that's another that's another question so I think social order should be able to work out what things the state should be primarily concerned with and and what things people can do okay let's open it up to questions from the floor and we'll start with gentleman here in the front row thank you thank you I would like to ask professor David Harvey something that touches on the rent here class and also on technology and knowledge the capitalist system is rightly accredited for the creation of performant technology especially concerning the acceleration of turnover time through mechanization and computerization Automation and competition between companies plays an important role and that's professor David Harvey agree that there exists a pernicious monopoly of companies especially in the energy sector who rather through cooperation this time collude to purchase intellectual intellectual property rights on patents and inventions which if produced would put an end to their supremacy and market control because these patents would be centralized the production of electricity for example and would also decentralize the production and control of mechanic energy I think that's probably it thank you I think I mean you're talking about it's a very critical area which is the struggle that's going on over intellectual property rights and free access to knowledge I think actually one of the greatest Commons we have is the knowledge we have accumulated and yet it is being enclosed at every turn and as you point out becomes a source of monopoly power and that's what you see in Google and that's what you see yeah that's what you see in in many of the biomedical areas right now and in pharmaceuticals and and and the like I I think that there is a role in any kind of social order for competition I don't think monopoly is all bad either it's the question of how those two get constructed there are some situations where frankly I think in this country you know just bringing back a sort of state monopoly over the rail system or something like that would make a lot of sense but but I I but but i but i think this this area again i talked about a new way of doing politics there are new areas of struggle which not those which of the sort that typically kind of working-class institutions and organizations were very adept to struggling however just to go back to what you were talking about and and at the same time there is a class of people who are struggling for free access open commons and and and you know that puts together all kinds of people from different social classes and different I mean there is a different there is a different configuration of people who recognize the need to talk through alternatives and he will certainly find many of those in this whole kind of question of the the knowledge economy and and and the struggles over intellectual property on the like that just takes Pete very briefly discussion what kind of reformers in versus revolutionary cuz these are those goals the goals to free up intellectual property here so these are reformist goals these are people who believe you can achieve this within a capitalist system but yet you are still a revolutionary so ultimately your view would be that the progress that can be made on those within a capitalist system in limited revolution there's a process not an event there's a lot of things which are what we call called revolutionary reforms that is reforms which are precursors to a more radical future I think that if the knowledge Commons was open to everybody if the access to education and higher education was open to everybody on an equal kind of basis instead of being structured as it is within the United States in particular through private schools and private education to a very tight kind of replication and class system if it's you know if it's like that I would you say okay we got a got to change all of that in order to start to really be able to think through I mean I'm all in favor of a lot of reforms provided the reforms provide the basis for the construction of some alternative great let's take the gentleman there with the time are you conscious at all of the powerful people who fund your university or have political influence over it they're conscious of them putting any pressure on you to change your mind I I don't have any pressure in the university I'm currently and at all whatever placed on here I'm I'm very lucky besides I'm half retired and don't care from that David with regard to the ideological changes that have taken place in our education in in the UK particularly why and how do you think it is that it's been comparatively easy for neoliberalism to take hold in British and particularly English universities I don't know I wish you would ask I mean I received answer that and then you know the the Thatcherite reforms that came in and then got sort of carried on and and deepened and advanced by successive labor governments didn't it seem to me generate a great deal of internal resistance within the academic world I think a lot of people welcomed the introduction of a certain kind of level of entrepreneurialism if I use my example of the United States a lot of younger people and many disciplines I was an engineering faculty and the majority of the young engineering faculty was in favor of the abolition of tenure because they took the view that tenure just gave you know older people rights that they didn't deserve I mean so there's there's been a social change in the mentalities something is our education point because what the other things are slightly bugged me about the book which a lot but you you know you clearly it fits your argument to emphasize the things that have got worse but you know you've said look higher education the story of higher education is that we've gone from it being free to it being charged for but you could equally say the story of Education has gone from 5% of people going to university to 40% of people going to university yeah is that not an accomplishment worth noting yeah the reason for the fees is to pay for the further than a much higher proportion of people are going to university and I you know I I don't I hope I don't appear in the book as somebody who thinks that everything that capital does is negative because I think actually it's a being great creative you know capitals being about creative destruction and it's been very creative and the only interesting question who who benefits from the creation and who benefits from the destruction and and you know I think was a great place for Velcro in life you know who's next yeah that's total ad that I I'm curious to your commentary on technological change and its relationship like basic income theory do you think that was enough technological change will get to a point where the universal alienation of people is negated by just jobs that are taken away by machinery and that would lead to a positive outcome as opposed just a negative outcome yeah the technological dynamism is a hugely important question I didn't have time to go into this a longest chapter in here on it clearly technology has become a business technology has been evolving very very very fast and it has capacities and powers that you know pretty inconceivable to people like me and yet they are there in the same way that a large number of manufacturing jobs were lost over the last 30 years to automation and Roberto Roberto zation and all the rest of it so we are beginning to see a large loss of jobs in the service sector labor is becoming increasingly redundant in many in many fields which poses all kinds of problems for everything from Marxist value theory to to you know what the nature of the market is going to be when when there are so many people who are either unemployed or on very low paying low-paying jobs can that be addressed by you know having a basic income structure or targeted redistributions or something of that kind well yes it might be in some way I think again the left should embrace these technological possibilities and what I one of the things I feared is that in the same way that the left fought against the industrialization in the 1970s and 1980s and it was a losing battle largely because of technological change not because of offshore 60% of the job losses in those in those years was technological not not offshoring and I think we're seeing the same thing likely to happen in services and the left battles against the loss of service jobs I think you'll be losing battle we should say all right that we are in a situation right now where mechanization and in manufacturing and robot ization and automation and artificial intelligence in service jobs is really radically transforming job structures to the to the point where actually there won't be jobs around for any decent sort for for for the future and if that's the case then we should be thinking about how to restructure social life around around around that so that the kind of alienation that are likely to occur can be countered and compensated for not by mindless consumerism but by some other kind of social structure in which targeted redistributions may actually have some have some very specific role role to play but how is going to handle that again is something that needs to be thoroughly thought about and debated and it's not it's not as simple as not a simple question at all I'm kind of except that I am convinced that we have to embrace these technological capacities and powers and we have to use them creatively and in a much more egalitarian and and I think much more useful you oriented configuration and if we could do that then I think we'll be you know on the way to creating an alternative to the kind of capitalist society in which we currently live so you don't use the phrase in your book in the book false consciousness but you have a chapter which which could be called false consciousness were part of your chapter about alienation could be seen to be that you're quite Stern about about about about consumerism but yeah you know there are actually more people in paid employment in Britain than ever in British history there are more people in paid employment in the world than in history so you can conceive at the possibility that more and more of us are employed doing more and more things but an example if would be the John K gives is abound men's hairdressing you know it used to be there a lot for you Bob was because men would gonna have a haircut it would cost ten Bob or something and they were just some play would do it in five minutes now men go to the hairdresser's and they pay more money and they enjoy it and all that kind of stuff you know you are you kind of saying look actually we've got enough stuff thank you very much we don't need all these fripperies we need instead to kind of concentrate you know or on the you know the development of our minds or whatever because you're white you're quite Stern about this stuff yeah well I think I think we should be quite Stern about it a lot of it you know I mean there were some figures I read on I don't know how true they were but after the Christmas shopping spree in the United States about one-third of the things that are bought are never used and they're thrown away directly and they just end up in the garbage can well you know this is kind of pretty mindless stuff but this has been going on for some time I mean my favorite example is you know the suburbanization of the United States the suburbanization of the United States forced people to buy lawn mowers you know you can either say that there's been a demand in secret lust for some lawn mowers and so on every Sunday morning you go out and you see everybody with their individual lawn mower around an American suburb going bro you know this is this is this is stupid kind of stuff I mean and and you then kind of say well there are issues about lifestyle here of what our real needs and work what are mandated by certain kind of structures which which force people into certain kinds of consumerism and I saw I think that I'm not against consumption you know I mean I enjoy certain kinds of consumption and I'm not against other people enjoying certain kinds of consumption but there's a lot that we're forced to do there has nothing whatsoever to do with once needs and desires it's just that this is the way in order to live i I have to I have to behave so you've had a monstrous critique of lawn mowers that's something which you can take home with you I'm going to take two or three final ones and then what and then we'll have to finish five years on from the financial crash it seems that the crisis that captured and went through has if anything strengthened capitalism and made it consolidate is power so I'm wondering does that force us to question the value of looking for contradictions in capitalism because it seems that rather than being a kind of productive set of contradictions that lead you know kind of her galleons electic to the revolution what we're actually seen to be seeing is a more kind of sterile sort of an set of you know sort of incoherencies in capitalism which doesn't actually guess guess us anywhere knows I noticed an advert for a supermarket loyalty scheme the other day that said him you know save spend more to save more you know as they were living with this kind of incoherence and set of double binds all the time and today actually gets us anywhere productive we've had some problems talking about whether as a working class in a middle class anymore and I spent last summer in Vietnam and what I see evolving there is actually an asset earning class or training class which is actually becoming huge and it becoming a large proportion of population and I'm just wondering what you think about that in that context and also how that translates to the assets that we own or the access to the assets that we own or the lack of access to assets here in UK more advanced economies I think we published the research last week that said there'll be more self-employed people in Britain in 2018 than public sector workers so you know it's interesting don't you now and then finally randomly I introduce the person here I'm sorry for those people I didn't choose no no forward portal sorry sorry there we are yes thank you very much yes I was surprised that you said technology creates alienation because I think technology as such I mean increases the possibility to do less work and it's dependent on the way in which the work is organized in the workplace using their technology whether the work that you do with the technology alienates people or increases their possibility to be creative so I think one should look more at the possible you say that we have to embrace the technologies and and see how we can use them and I think one way of embracing is is to look at the way in which work is organized and the second way is to see okay maybe we don't have to work eight hours or 45 hours a week because the the interesting contradiction and here's another contradiction is that while jobs are replaced the people who are in work work much more stressful higher stress higher work density and intensity so that would be a way of thinking how can we use technologies in a way that decreases the work inve and the density of the work instead of putting the blame on technology as such so you've got that question you've got the question about kind of new small business holders of small asset holders or back that grow to that kind of class then you've got the point about why don't these contradictions ever take us anywhere well let me start with why they don't take us anywhere in any historical moment there's likely to be a particular configuration of of possibilities and I think it is notable that the crisis of 2007 2008 did not actually produce a mass response when you would have thought it might there was some surveys done of people who'd lost their houses in the United States and I've been very surprised that there hadn't been some mass movement against the foreclosures I mean there are there are partial movements but no mass movement and part of the reason was when you ask people why they lost their houses they all blame themselves and I think this is the neoliberal ethic and the success of the implantation in people's heads of a kind of neoliberal way of thinking to say well if I lost my house I must have done something wrong and actually I've been trying to think about why it is that is so difficult in times like this to create political movements with some sort of long-term political perspective and again a lot of it has to do with the form that alienation is taking it's a rather passive kind of alienation given to occasional outbursts of anger in which people will feel just victimized but but also feel powerless and and if you want to get anything done then you really have to make a you know tremendous lot of noise about your victimization and and that doesn't seem to me too good politics I mean we've seen some specific examples of that in the United States and I could tell you about them but but so I think there is a there are some good reasons why this crisis is not led to a movement on the Left which is coherent and cohesive what is bothersome of course is the movement on the right which is picking up on the alienation and which is really absolutely kind of running with it and and getting some subtraction and again this would mean that we have to ask some questions as to why that is the case and of course it has a lot to do with the anti-immigrant kind of thing that all of our problems are due to immigrants and everything would be okay if we just didn't have you know all these people coming into the country and doing all the jobs we don't like so so I so so I think there's an analysis that needs to be done around around that question I don't have a Hegelian view of you know sort of the movement of history at all and I don't I don't care for mechanical breakdown stories of about about capital accumulation crises are moments of difficulty and of opportunity for all sorts of class forces to do different things and it so happens that the class force that was most benefited from this particular crisis is the top 1% no question no question about it and it has done so by and I think again we could do a better analysis than we've done by it was a set of stratagems in relationship to the way political power is organized and orchestrated the Vietnam question is for me again when you look at the uneven geographical development that exists in the world you'll find all kinds of parts of the world that are going in different directions for instance I mean spending some time in Turkey and and and of course Turkey is a boom economy it's the fastest growing economy in the world after China and throughout this recession is hardly experienced anything of any kind of barrier or at all the places a crazy building site but at the same time of course there are lots of social stresses and as we've seen there are eruptions against it so in each specific place though and I'm not familiar with Vietnam what you'll find is a specific configuration and so things look different there than somewhere else and I think that beyond you know uneven geographical development is of course one of the ways in which capital successfully replicates itself because it finds a successful way of doing something over here and then says well if everybody was like that then you would be okay I mean in the 1980s if we were sitting in this room where people would be saying well if we all were like West Germany or Japan we'd be okay and you know and be like Japan right now I mean I've been in deflation for the last 10 15 20 years I mean you know well so now we all have to be like China or turkey or something you know I mean this is so so so I think that the uneven geographical developments very very very strong and of course there have been some remarkable redistributions of wealth for over the last 20 odd years wealth which historically had drained from east to west as really has gone back the other way and and we see wealth being drained from the west and going back to the Far East right now so there are shifts of that sort which make a real real difference and the technological dynamism I mean again the full argument about that is that you would you would have thought that the given that a lot of technological dynamism is about time saving that we will be living in a society where there was a lot of free time the interesting thing is you talk to everybody and they kind of say I don't have any free time Capital has become very sophisticated about absorbing people's free time because it doesn't want you to have free time because you might think and they want you to be so damn busy dealing with the telephone company and with the you know all the things you have to deal with and and that actually you have no time whatsoever so this is if you like the center of the the contradiction you would have thought given the technological capacities that we could be on a three-day week or something like that right now but that is not that's not the way that's not in the program you know I mean before all kinds of political and and other reasons at the same time of course we find a lot of people who are unemployed and supposedly have a lot of time on their hands well some unemployed people do but my experience with working a little bit with unemployed or underemployed people in Baltimore back in their night you know 1990s was they didn't have any free time at all I mean it's it's real busy work being unemployed I mean trying to get this done and then dealing with you know the unemployment office and dealing with some other kind of thing and trying to get trying to get doctor to deal with something I'm not charging too much I'm trying to deal with you know dealing with the debt kind of thing so so there's a paradox about this this technology which has been there for a long time I mean Marx kind of comments it kind of says well the interesting thing is that John Stuart Mill complained bitterly that that labor-saving technologies don't seem to make of lighten the load of Labor they end up intensifying labor and he says well there's a very simple reason for that the capital is in control of the technologies and capital deploys the technologies to squeeze ever more value out of our social labor and that all the time you have that power relation that is the way in which technologies are fundamentally going to be used and so it is your right to kind of say well what if we could start to use this stuff collectively you do see this happening in in small computer companies with collective kind of management structures and so on and and and cooperatives and so on you see we will see this happening in in in in small pieces but by and large that's not the story that's happening the story we would like to see something that could be a company accomplished but that is precisely what's going to take if you like a revolutionary movement in a transformative movement over many many years to try to restructure the way in which a employment is is organized which is a very good moment to finish our conversation David's book is available it's a fantastic read I did two contradictions a day over the last week kept me on my toes he will sign it as long as in signing it he doesn't change his use value to an exchange value I'm sure that's you would approve of people selling it on eBay as a consequence of of that thank you off the questions sorry for those of you I didn't get to call but most of all can you join me in thanking David Holly

Channel: RSA

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Keywords: the, rsa, Capitalism (Idea), The RSA, David Harvey (Philosopher), Matthew Taylor

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Length: 68min 19sec (4099 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 09 2014