SPIRALLING OUT OF CONTROL: Nancy Fraser and David Harvey

greetings everyone welcome to spy spiraling out of control on the fate of capital and capitalism in the 21st century a conversation between Nancy Fraser and David Harvey this event is organized to celebrate the occasion of the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Marx's capital my name is Mary Taylor I'm the assistant director at the center for place culture and politics and we're happy to be co-sponsoring this event with Jacobin magazine I want to let you know that if you'd like to find out about more events like this at the center you can go to pcp gcq need you to find out more about our events you can sign up on the on the web page to receive our newsletter if you'd like I also want to let you know that we are recording this event tonight so please speak clearly into the microphone if you choose to ask a question so that it will be recorded for posterity once again we're very happy to have you here thanks to Jacobin magazine and I'd like to introduce Bhaskar Sankara who is the founding editor and publisher of Jacobin as well as the publisher of catalyst a journal of theory and strategy Bhaskar thank you all for for being here I was really excited to moderate this event particularly because I'm a notoriously over-involved moderator most of the time I'm like puffy on a biggie track you know I'm always there mumbling in the background whispering you know just just really distracting the audience but but this time I'm in you know such illustrious company I'm just gonna shut up and have a very easy easy job so obviously the first volume of Marx's capital was published 150 years ago this year it's a difficult book made a little bit easier with Professor Harvey's work but one that's fresh and alive it draws on a rich literary history from Shakespeare - le to de Balzac it's really rewarding but for all those literary flourishes it's a contribution you know that that really is significant for rooting and grounding socialist ideas in the study of political economy because we can't speak of capital without talking about socialism and for socialists there could be nothing more vital than understanding how the labor process the production distribution of goods in the accumulation of surplus functions that's why this recent kind of returned to Marx more broadly the return to to capital in particular as opposed to just you know 1844 manuscripts and other you know still worthwhile works of course is so so promising so today David Harvey and Nancy Frasier will be discussing their recent work as well as responding to each other on the occasion of the anniversary then hopefully at the end we'll still have some time for for questions from the from the audience Nancy Fraser is a professor in The New School for Social Research and the holder of an international research chair at the college of global studies in in Paris I considered trying to pronounce it an original for but luckily I did not do that trained as a philosopher at CUNY she specializes in critical social theory and political philosophy her new book capitalism a conversation and critical theory will be published by polity a press in spring and you know she has throughout her work theorized capitalism relation to democracy racial oppression and social reproduction ecological crisis and feminist movements in a series of essays there's been a bunch in new left review recently as well as critical history historical studies and also recently in the verso published book fortunes of feminism from state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis Nancy's work has been translated into more than 20 languages and actually twice cited by the Brazilian Supreme Court that's like a little little bit of trivia yes right not not as a pretext to to ask the PT she's currently president of the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division and Roth family distinguished Visiting Scholar at Dartmouth College David Harvey is a distinguished professor of anthropology and geography at CUNY and author of various books articles and lectures he's the author most recently most recently Brazil there've 17 contradictions in the end of capitalism which was one of the guardians best books to 2011 the Enigma of capital and the crisis of capitalism other books include companion to Marx's capital and my personal favorite limits to capital and professor Harvey has been teaching Karl Marx's capital for nearly 40 years I'm sure many of us in the room got through capital with the help of his lectures and as those videos of them if you're interested that are available on his website and his new book published by Oxford University Press which was actually gonna be available tonight this called Marx capital and the madness of economic reason and I guess we'll start off with a contribution from Nancy thank you very much Bhaskar and thank you Mary Taylor for organizing this and David for suggesting the idea I want to say because I don't think the letters are big enough that my book is actually co-authored with Rahul yogi who is sitting here in the audience and it has the form of a dialogue about how to think about capitalism and a critical theory of capitalism the what I'm going to say tonight represents my own views but I'm only one voice in another dialogue so to hear a rally Aggies views you have to read the book I do see from the juxtaposition that our cover is not as gripping I think maybe we should go go back to the drawing room on that the book is not out yet so maybe we could even good yeah I it is nice to be here at cuny because I did get my PhD here in the philosophy department and I think this might be the first or maybe the second time I've been invited back since then I wasn't invited by the philosophy department we should say I also wanted to mention I don't know if David remembers but I to cut my teeth on Das Kapital with you David in a study group in Baltimore in the late 60s in my Trotskyist days so okay here we are full circle now the title of this event is spiraling out of control on the fate of capital and capitalism in the 21st century I read this title as a highly compressed and very evocative diagnosis of our current situation I read the first part spiraling out of control as referring to the concept of crisis and the second part as specifying the object of the crisis as capitalism or perhaps the current form of capitalism that we're living with in the 21st century neoliberal globalizing financialized capitalism either way as I read our title we are here to discuss the present crisis of capitalism and I should say at the outset that I am fully persuaded that there is such a crisis that it is a crisis of capitalism and so I'm a hundred percent behind the proposal if that's what it was to make this the agenda for the discussion now as I see it everything turns on how we interpret the two major concepts that together make up this topic namely the concept of crisis and the concept of capitalism so in my initial statement here I want to try to clarify those concepts and I'm going to do so in a way that might be slightly provocative aimed at sharpening what might turn out to be differences or disagreements between the two of us for the sake of a lively discussion so I want to suggest that there are at least two possible ways of interpreting the concepts of crisis and of capitalism one set of interpretations is relatively narrow while the other is quite broad I'm going to use my time in this initial round to present these alternatives and to argue in favor of the second broader interpretation so I'm going to be making the case for what I'm going to call an expanded conception of capitalism and an expanded conception of capitalist crisis I'll try to suggest in closing that these conceptions equip us to clarify the sense in which our current our present situation really is aptly described as a crisis of capitalism that they might help us as well to envision a response to this crisis that can put us on a path to an emancipatory resolution so I'm going to begin with the concept of capitalism often capitalism is understood narrowly as an economic system I don't just mean by bourgeois economists of the classical and neoclassical schools even many Marxists have subscribed to some version or another of the narrow definition it's true of course that they follow Marx in penetrating beneath the bourgeois perspective of commodity exchange on the market to the more fundamental level of commodity production and it's there of course again following Marx that they discover the secret of accumulation in capitals exploitation of wage labor wage laborers who are of course recompensed only for the socially necessary costs of their own reproduction while the surplus value their labor generates goes instead to the capitalist so in the traditional Marxist view as I'll call it this exploitative process is the crux of the capitalist system it's the source of capital's otherwise mysterious capacity to self expand it's not really self expansion at all this capacity is thought to reside primarily in the relation between two classes on the one hand the capitalists who own the societies means of production and who appropriate its surplus on the other the free but propertyless producers who have to sell their labor power piecemeal in order to live capitalism on this view is a system of class domination but class domination as interpreted here is at bottom a relation located in the capitalist economy and denominated as it were in value this in Category now I want to say that this traditional Marxist view as I'm calling it is a huge improvement over that of the dismal scientists who populate the economics departments of nearly all our universities my own being a welcomed exception its account of exploitation and class domination is spot on in identifying some of the most fateful and important forces that drive developments in capitalist societies and it offers a genuinely critical perspective on those forces unlike the ideologues who see nothing amiss in these arrangements those who subscribe to the Marxian view of capitalism as an economic system centered on working-class exploitation see that system not only as unjust but also as inherently crisis prone in their view capitalism's orientation to limitless accumulation through the exploitation of wage labor tends over time to raise the organic composition of capital exerting downward pressure on the rate of profit intensifying competition and encouraging financial speculation all developments that lead periodically to economic crises leaving the details of that complicated argument aside we can say that for traditional Marxism capitalist crisis has its roots in an economic system that harbors mutually contradictory imperatives within itself and that is expressed the crisis is expressed economically now again I take it as a given that these accounts of capitalism and capitalist crisis are genuinely insightful that they have actual critical purchase on social reality but I nevertheless consider them narrow to narrow in fact to clarify the actual crisis of capitalism we are living through now the problem is that the traditional view folk is overwhelmingly on social processes and social relations that are accorded value in capitalist society whether we are talking about production circulation or distribution the relations in question are situated within the precincts that capitalist society itself defines as economic and the processes involve activity that capital itself considers to have economic value now this is as I say a restricted view of capitalism and it brings with it a restricted view of capitalist crisis the view of crisis two is focused on contradictions internal to the capitalist economy what generates crisis on this view again are the internal dynamics of the economic system which harbors a built-in tendency to self destabilization the principal expression of capitalist crisis is likewise economic mark market crashes bankruptcy chains bursting of speculative bubbles runs on currency depressions widespread cessation of production and mass unemployment now to see why I'm calling these conceptions narrow consider that they leave out a broad swath of social relations and social processes which are officially defined as non-economic but which nevertheless supply the indispensable background preconditions for a capitalist economy I'm thinking for example of the unwaged activities of social reproduction which assure the supply of labor for economic production while also creating maintaining the social bonds solidarities and forms of trust that can sustain capitalist society more generally the capitalist economy literally could not function without these activities even though it has historically accorded them little or no money value and often does not pay for them even today the same is true for the apparatuses of public power law police regulatory agencies and steering capacities that supply the order predictability and infrastructure that are necessary for sustained accumulation these two are indispensable to capitalist commerce even though capital is happy to squeeze them to the breaking point whenever it can equally necessary to the capitalist economy is a relatively sustainable organization of our metabolic interaction with the rest of nature not to mention a sorry one that ensures essential supplies of energy and raw materials for commodity production not to mention a habitable planet that can support life absent this ecological condition capital accumulation would grind to a halt now what I mean by an expanded view of capitalism is one that includes these background conditions as well as the foreground economic system they undergird the central conceptual move that I'm making here is quite similar to the one that Marx made in Volume one of capital there he viewed exploitative production as a hidden abode beneath market exchange an abode that harbors the dirty secret of exploitation namely to repeat that workers are paid only the average socially necessary costs of their reproduction and no more in the same spirit the expanded view treats social reproduction public power and historical nature as additional abodes but more hidden still abodes that lie beneath the sphere of production and contain even dirtier secrets namely that capital free rides on them ex-pro creating productive inputs and conditions of production for whose reproduction it does not pay unlike labour or does not anywhere near fully pay so this is a form of expropriation if you like that lies beneath exploitation and renders it possible on this expanded view capitalism is no mere economic system but an institutionalized social order on a par for example with feudalism it is built on a distinctive set of institutional divisions first the separation of economic production from social reproduction which as you know corresponds to the division between wage work performed largely by men at least historically an unpaid work performed overwhelmingly still today by women second there's the separation of the economic from the political which corresponds to the division between public and private power as well as to the division between core and periphery and finally there's the separation of human society from non human nature which pre-existed capitalism of course but was vastly sharpened and intensified by it I'm claiming that these institutional separations are specific to and constitutive of capitalist society they are elements of its DNA and as such they are historically faithful if not simply perverse capitalist societies separate their economies from the large from the the latter's indispensable conditions of possibility setting their economies loose to disregard their own conditions of possibility and even at times to destroy them in effect in capitalist societies official economies are dependent on processes and social relations whose value they disavow this peculiar relationship of separation come dependence come disavow is I think a built-in source of potential instability or Christ on the one hand capital accumulation is not self-sustaining but relies on social reproduction public power and various historical natures on the other hand its drive to unlimited accumulation threatens to destabilize the very processes and capacities that capital itself not to mention the rest of us need the effect over time can be to jeopardize the necessary background conditions of the capitalist economy capitalist society in other words is primed to eat its own tail so here we're talking about crisis not just economic crisis but also social reproductive crisis political crisis and ecological crisis on the expanded view of capitalism these non-economic dysfunctions are not accidental but systemic they arise from contradictions in the deep structure of capitalist society just like the economic dysfunctions that were theorized in the narrower view so the expanded view of capitalism brings with it an expanded view of capitalist crisis in these cases however the contradictions are not located inside the capitalist economy but at the borders that simultaneously separate and connect production and reproduction economy and polity human society and non human nature the contradictions are internal neither to the economy nor to any one social sphere but arise rather between the constitutive elements of the society I think of them sometimes as pool onion cry Systema posed to Marxian crisis tendencies but that's a useful way of thinking only if you are very clear that they are not alternatives neither one is a replacement for the other in this expanded view of capitalism both sorts of crisis tendencies are fundamental I think therefore that to Carl's are better than one now the expanded view has many advantages I think a shooing economy ISM it casts ecological degradation social dislocation and D democratization as non-accidental expressions of deep-seated contradictions no longer epiphenomena Lex prescience of real economic dysfunctions they simply are in and of themselves systemic dimensions of capitalist crisis how am i doing on time so because capitalism separates commodity production based on wage work from social reproduction based largely on unpaid labor especially of women and because it makes the first depend on the second while simultaneously disavowing the the second the value of the second capitalism periodically destabilizes social reproduction throughout its history we see a periodic outbreak of crises of social reproduction and periodic efforts to restructure capitalism so as to diffuse and mitigate if not fully overcome those crises of social reproduction similarly capitalism separates the economic from the political even as it also makes the economic free ride on the political and and as it periodically hollows out the very public powers that secure the possibility of private appropriation of surplus value so periodically - in the course of capitalism's history we have tremendous political crises both at the national level and geopolitically and internationally including of course struggles around imperialism and colonial rule this is an absolutely endemic part of capitalist history and the spur often to again periodic attempts to remake capitalism so as to better diffuse or mitigate the political dimension of its crisis and finally all of what I've just said applies as well to the fact that capitalism's institutionalized imperative to limitless accumulation combines with its construction of nature as humanity's other to ensure that nature is instrumentalized and cannibalized in ways that periodically imperil it and so we can see - throughout capitalism's history periodic outbreaks of ecological crisis that give rise to efforts to restructure capitalism in a way so as to find and new historical nature's and new ways of organizing its relation to nature so let me just say that nothing I've said here in any way refutes Marx or the economic crisis story that Marxist tell the presence of the inter realm contradictions I've been discussing does not at all disprove the idea that capitalism's economic subsystem also harbors internal contradictions that idea captures an important feature of a social order that is subject to repeated economic depressions and financial crashes what the expanded view does do however is resituated arrow view in a broader frame I don't know if I dare read this next clause much like Einstein resituated Newton that's not a bit grandiose in any way in any case this expanded view does clarify why social conflict in capitalist societies has repeatedly assumed the guise of struggles over nature social reproduction imperialism to amok recei as well as over various labor debt and other economic issues the expanded view invites us to conceive these struggles as what I've called boundary struggles which concern the existence location and character of the boundaries separating economy from polity production from reproduction human society from non-human nature these boundaries mark the institutional separations I mentioned earlier but they are not given once and for all on the contrary social actors social movements have repeatedly mobilized around these boundaries seeking to relocate contest or defend them especially in periods of crisis and sometimes they've actually succeeded in redrawing them social democracy for example significantly redrew some of the boundaries I've mentioned struggles over where whether and how to divide States for markets families from factories and society from nature are as fundamental to capitalist society as deeply grounded in its institutional structure as is constant contestation over the rate of exploitation or the distribution of surplus-value examples include today struggles over clean water housing fishing rights and childcare among many many others exceeding the problematic of economic distribution or the organization of labor these are struggles over the grammar of capitalist life Contra economistic Marxism which may or may not be the Marxism of Marx these are neither secondary contradictions nor up a phenomenal expressions of economic realities but again it would be a mistake to think of boundary struggles as replacing class struggles class struggles remain endemic indeed central to capitalist society and it would be folly to jettison that idea just because the front lines of labor militancy are now to be found in Guangzhou as opposed to in Manchester or Detroit here - fortunately there is no obstacle to incorporating the narrow view of capitalist conflict within the broader view the two ideas are complementary not antithetical so here - in other words - Carl's are better than one just about finished the expanded view has one additional advantage it offers the chance to integrate Marxist theory with the best insights of feminism post colonialism critical race theory and political ecology it allows us to bring all these resources to bear along with Marxian motifs in a critique of the forms of structural crisis and social struggle we experience now in the financialized capitalism of the present era that crisis is multifaceted encompassing not only economic and financial strands but also ecological political and social reproductive strands it cannot be adequately understood by means of an economist ik critical theory however the various strands of the present crisis do not form a dispersed plurality on the contrary they are interconnected and they share a common source all are grounded in the deep structure of contemporary capitalism which as I said is globalizing neoliberal and financialized a critical theory of contemporary crisis must be a theory of capitalism especially of financialized capitalism but one that avoids any hint of reductive economies 'im instead of conceiving capitalism narrowly as an economic system such a theory must conceive it broadly as an institutionalized social order only such an expanded view can do justice to a crisis that is at one in the same time multi-dimensional and grounded in a single identifiable social formation thank you I like I like the Einstein reference you should have been more confident about it this is scientific socialism David will will speak speak next yes yeah I don't usually do this but I won't just want to show a couple of images but I want to thank Nancy for responding so positively to this possibility to have this discussion I value it a lot I think that we can put a lot of things together and as you'll see many areas of overlap and there are some differences but I'm old enough to have tremendous impatience with what we call the narcissism of small differences so I hope that we won't get into little niggly things about you know anyway I'm sure we won't and we go back long long enough that we can transcend a lot of that in the in the book that are just done I had two aims one was to ask the question what was Marx trying to do in writing capital and the second question was if we try to reconstruct what he was trying to do in writing book capital does that reconstruction help us understand many of the dilemmas that we currently face and I would want to say that yes a good reading of Marx does illuminate a great deal but we have to actually start to understand Marx's capital as a whole rather than as in bits and pieces in this regard and what I did was to try to set up a way of thinking about the circulation of capital in general and to try to situate the three volumes of capital in particular in relationship to it and I'm now going to try and use this technology which I obviously will not know how to use okay Mary I'm by default a Luddite anyway yeah yeah I managed to turn it off and see that's what I always do one of the things I want to point out about marks however is this that Marx didn't write a book on capitalism in fact you can read all the way through Marx and never find the word capitalism he writes about capital and I think this distinction is important and I think because he was writing about just about capital he does indeed take a narrow path very frequently excluding all kinds of things which should be looked at and should be thought about but which don't get into the Marxist Canon the second thing is I think it's important to understand that Marx never finished his project and he was constantly changing his mind so the temptation that exists always to say that Marx said as if it definitively know what he was had in mind I think we have to abandon that even Volume one which was the one book that was published he was still tinkering with it with French Edition which actually held in my hands two weeks ago of 1872 had all kinds of modifications of Volume one and so he frequently talked about the way he wished to actually bring back Volume one and started all over again so the idea that Marx had very settled views I think is he's wrong nevertheless there are many things that he I think he explored and came up with which I think for me we are of critical importance so the second you see I managed to screw these things up so fantastically but so what what I was doing then was trying to pin together some ideas about about the three volumes of capital and what I wanted to do was to was to create a picture of visualization of exactly what he was doing okay okay now my my inspiration for this being a geographer was the water cycle the hydrological cycle this is a circulation process which goes through various Metamorpho seas in which you start as a sort of liquid in the ocean and evaporation turns it into gaseous kind of and then it moves around and then it comes down in all kinds of different ways multiple ways some of it gets lost underground and stays there for centuries some of it gets locked up in ice and snow some of it rushes back down to the ocean so I get so this cycle is kind of a familiar kind of understanding of a physical process and I seem to me that it was be possible I think to set up a parallel cycle which would yeah okay this is the the cycle that that I set up now in order to understand this you have to understand the various pieces of the story we start at the bottom with money capital so a capitalist takes some money and decides they're going to use that money to make more money and their various ways in which you can do it but the way that Marx is looking at industrial capital is the way the capitalist gets into and the market and buys two kinds of commodities labor power and means of production you couldn't leave it I'm fantastic with these things I really anyway so okay you start at the start with money capital and you go into the marketplace and you buy two commodities labor power means of production you put the labor power means a production together with a given technology and you produce another commodity but you don't only produce commodity you also produce a value and Marx says you use value and surplus value which is the what is being converted in the money form into the commodity form into the production apparatus so we get these meta morphosis that Marx talks about which ends up with a particular kind of commodity and then the commodity is then taken into the market and sold and it's realized its value in money form and that money form is then distributed in various form some of it goes in wages some of it goes in taxes some of it goes in industrial profit Merchants profit rent and interest then some of that money over there cycles back as consumer effective demand because all of those people who have been distributed to after live but some of it also turns around and comes back as reinvestment into the system so you get a cycle like the water cycle and this is what Marx describes in in capital volume 1 but what is interesting is the way in which this gets set up against a background of other things which is the things that concern Nancy very much in her presentation but I also want if you'd like to deepen an understanding of this process for example Volume one of capital deals only with the transition from money capital up until the point of realization and then Marx assumes at the point of realization that everything exchanges at its value and I don't have to consider anything anymore he also assumes there's no problem of distribution so he doesn't consider that so volume 1 simply deals with one part of this story and there is in the english-speaking world at what they might call a slight disease in reading marks which is called volume one itis which is that everybody reads volume 1 insofar as they read capital this would be a wonderful book and it's an incredible kind of read and it's fantastic to spend time with it and and then they kind of say that's all there is but actually question of realisation is important because right at the end of the very first section of Volume one of capital mark says if you get to the point of realization and nobody wants needs and desires a commodity or nobody has I want need and desire backed by ability to pay then there is no value so that is the dialectical relation between production and realization that is the core of this whole thing but Marx excludes that from Volume one of capital except in sort of little bits and pieces I mean in Chapter three he does talk about the fact that you know commodities are in love with money but the course of true love never did run smooth but you you recognize the importance of the realization of value in money form and that what lies behind that are consumers with wants needs and desires and again Marx talks in very brief terms about the fact that once needs and desires have to be structured in a certain kind of way and then you look at the history of capitalism and about the construction of wants needs and desires and the transformation of once needs and desires and they become absolutely critical and this is something he mentions elsewhere this become critical in redefining what the nature of a capitalist society is about the constant transformation of one's needs and desires and the necessity of matching those transformations with the capacity to absorb the commodities which are being produced so there's a relationship between one's needs and desires because and consumer effective demand and production and Marx talks about the contradictory unity that has to exist within the circulation of capital between production and realization so one of the problems arising in capital is that realization is not very well looked at and and Marx abandons it after a little while and says as far as the theory of capital is concerned I'm not really going to get into that too far I'm going to say that the study of once needs and desires is a problem for history not for political economy and I think Nancy is quite right to complain that this sometimes keeps things Institute far too narrow a view but the realization of value then is something which does have over crop up in volume 2 of capital but interestingly volume 2 of capital assumes all of the findings of volume 1 don't exist so that suddenly you find yourself in a different kind of world it's like looking at a different perspective for instance there's no technological change in in volume 2 of capital and and and that means that one of the most dynamic things you start to see and in Volume one is that history of technological change and and and also the realization is taken up as a kind of a very very serious kind of kind of problem and he gets into the issue of how do you coordinate all these different commodities being produced into a different turn over times and working periods and so on so they all come together how do you deal with the circulation of fixed capital how do you deal with the fact that many consumer items last for many years how do you deal that money then says well I the only way you can deal with this is to introduce the credit system but he then says the credit system does not belong in Volume one and it doesn't belong in volume two it belongs in volume three so I'm not going to say any more about this until I've done all the work in volume three so you suddenly see that they're actually the unity between volume two and volume three becomes very critically important and you cannot complete the argument of volume two without going to volume 3 and then complicate it by going back into volume 1 the same thing applies in the area of distribution volume 3 is basically about distribution of course there are other things come in as well but it's about distribution and the distribution field is very complicated also so issues arise about rent and interest and merchant profit and industrial profit what and Marx asked the question why do those different forms of capital have a role to play in a society that's dominated by Industrial capital and that then suddenly becomes that one of the big questions so the distribution field has a different a different story to it now my argument here is that if you really want to understand Marx's concept of capital no capitalism capital you go to I understand the unity of volume one two and three hardly anybody reads volume two because it's boring number three is kind of you know a mess it's fascinating but a mess so it's very difficult to put this together but you can see once you've got in this that if you cannot put all three volumes together and understand about these the relations between these these volumes then you're going to be in real difficulty and and and I like I say this volume one itis takes over and people go back to the theses of Volume one and talk about that but which which are perfectly okay in their own way but look at the assumptions what Marx does again and again and again is to say look I'm going to build a model of how capital works I'm interested in both writing a critique of classical political economy and showing the real source of profit and exploitation or those kinds of things but I'm also interested in defining the rule the laws of motion of capital as he puts it that is is there something going on in this kind of area where where these laws of motion of capital can be defined and here you will immediately find yourself in a different terrain then you're in when you're looking at the water cycle because this system has to expand it's not a cycle Marx again and again and the grundrisse it says it's a spiral and it's a spiral which is constantly imposing danger because the spiral form is constantly getting out of control and there are various ways in which you can get a crisis in this system a blockage at any one of these points anywhere in this process gives you a crisis and there is a tendency within Marxist say there's only one form of crisis what you immediately see from this is there are various places where you can get crises it may be that there are not once needs and desires everybody decides they don't like they're not going to deal with it and so once needs and desires can actually be a source of a crisis in this system failure to realize and and and and problems of realization and so on and compare crisis the problems of the labor process there are problems over getting the money out of the distributional field and getting it flow back in reinvestment there are all these sorts of things which exist so the crises exist all over this place and so I could sort of go through this in much more detail if you want but you can see immediately that in a cyclical flow you can't say this is the real point of crisis everything is potentially a point of crisis and you know I have these arguments only two weeks ago in London with a whole bunch of people who are into the falling rate of profit they said there's only one form of crisis that matters and that's the falling rate of profit and I kind of say well that's not saying there's only one way you can die and that's because your heart stops it means you know and and and sure enough but on the other hand the cause of death can be or never failed you or your or your stomach gave out or something like that I mean in other words we have to think about this as being a multiple you know as a as a systemic process and anything that interrupts the flow and Marx becomes very very concerned about the flow so it's a spiral form it's growing how does it grow it has to expand both sort of in intensity but also in extensive so it's expansion area geographically and so we get a kind of a theory of geographical expansion and I think this is a very important argument about Marx's capital because the capitalist mode of production when Marx was writing dominated only in a very small corner of the world it was mostly Britain Western Europe and the eastern seaboard of the United States but the capitalist mode of production dominates everywhere now so actually Marx's analysis of a capital is more significant now than it was way back there and the question is how do we keep the spiral form going how do you keep accumulation going at a compounding rate from here on out you know when you're looking at everything's been going on in China everything that's been going on in you know and in in in India as well as you know in the traditional centers of capital accumulation so this is this is one point the spiral form the other thing is the speed with which this moves is terribly important Marx points out you get a crisis not because something gets blocked but because it doesn't get sold in time so the temporality of this becomes significant and actually what you see historically is the temporality is speeding up its going faster much faster and if you look at the speed of movement in the kind of financial markets you see is it nanoseconds or even smaller than smaller than that and this speed-up becomes absolutely central so you have to actually speed up all the elements within this system the distributional structures and speed up realization so the world of consumerism then gets caught up how do you speed up consumerism well you produce goods which are either instantaneously obsolete like you know the next phone thing or you produce goods that fall apart if you if you produce goods that last 150 years and then then capitalism is dead it's gone I mean there's no way that you could last I'm very anti capitalist in my behavior I still use my grandmother's porks and and and if you do that then you know who's gonna make Forks if everybody uses your grandmother's Forks you know and there's no market in Forks so so making markets up there and but that also comes back to something which is very important which is the creation of a lifestyle and one of the ways in which one's needs and desires are set up is by the creation of whole new lifestyles and my favorite example is suburbanization in the United States after 1945 the creation of a whole new knife style what did it want well he created a demand for four cars a demand for you know all kinds of household technologies you know my favorite thing is a huge demand for lawn mowers and and where did that come from as if somehow or other yeah but this the creation of a lifestyle is is is absolutely critical to the way which capitalism works now I'm concentrating on this this this cyclical kind of process which in some ways is what Nancy is referring to when she's talking about the foreground versus the background or the and I share entirely the view that you cannot examine capitalism simply by reducing capitalism to capital that is not what you can do if you want to understand capitalism you've got to understand the context in which this circulation process operates what it effects and how it works so when I kind of say one of the ways in which it solved the once needs and desires problems after 1945 was suburbanization well what does that entail entire transformations of social relations environments and and and all the rest of it lousy land-use practices and alike which gets you then to what I would call contextual conditions that Marx did mention and say basically I'm not dealing with them and he's very clear about this and I have no problem with Marx saying okay I'm not dealing with it because if he says that you know you know very clearly I have problems with Marxists who don't actually recognize that he's made these assumptions and that when you drop the assumptions the world looks rather different for instance something that's very you know very close to what Nancy's been working on and many other people it's the whole kind of question of social reproduction reproduction of labour power and the line Marx gets to it and says I'm not dealing with it it's not as if he says it's unimportant he says I'm not dealing with it because I'm you know my theory of capital is it says that capital doesn't really care about that capital basically says to the worker go ahead and do whatever you want and just make sure that you come back to work next day and we'll give you the money and for the wage and that's it so Marx is kind of saying in a sense I'm trying to reconstruct what capital cares about and what capital does and capital doesn't care about social reproduction except that it takes what is there and and appropriates it and appropriate it as a free good and actually mark starts to talk about the free gifts of nature free gifts of nature are very important there is no now assess he says there there a vital force for the survival of capitalism but I'm not going to deal with that here the metabolic relation to nature he talks about and says well it's a significant thing and but I'm not going to deal with that here and similarly about the the production reproduction and destruction of human nature and culture that suburbanization meant a transformation of human character a transformation of human wants needs and desires and and therefore there is a perpetual kind of process to this kind but again Marx says I'm not dealing with that and again I have no problem with him saying that I have a problem with with kind of saying well therefore it doesn't matter or a secondary or it's irrelevant or something of that kind which I really don't think it's the case so when you start to look at the contextual conditions you'll see a number of areas and reproduction of labour power Marx doesn't deal with that he doesn't deal with the free gifts of human nature except to say you know we have to understand the the knowledge the the talents and so on that are in the the culture of get transmitted culturally within the working class and others also the same thing about production reproduction and destruction of space place and nature this is an area where Marx again talks about this as being significant but it doesn't get into it in great detail except in one regard in my own work I've been very interested in urbanization and very interested in fixed capital investment in the built environment the transformation of nature as Marx talks about it to second nature second nature is that nature which has come to us through human modification and the human modification of that world so it produces you know fields which are already sort of cleared cities and and and the like that takes investment so money has to be diverted from this circulation process into another circulation process which is going to create the built environment the roads and highways and how and all the rest of it and and and not of this is about of course the construction of place and space and all the rest of it so that so that these contextual conditions are absolutely vital for understanding capitalism and and and and therefore but we've got to understand that that is not what Marx is dealing with not Marx is dealing with his capital now there are a number of things that come out of the study of capital and I think it's what this is the one of the points we would want to make I'm perfectly happy with saying okay look there are crises in the environment there are crises or social reproduction and but what Marx does is to say this driving engine of capital accumulation is a spiral and it has certain rules of operation and those rules of operation are such as to have to be acknowledged have to be obeyed if capital is going to get reproduced as a social system and once you know the laws of motion and you know have some ideas then you know some of the pressures which exist on society for example I've mentioned already the idea that this is a spiral form because you have to produce surplus-value you have to produce more at the end of the day than you had at the beginning of the day you have to do it on a continuous kind of basis and a faster and faster basis and what that says is the law of motion is such that it means accumulation for accumulation sake as marx puts it it means that this system has to keep on growing growing growing and therefore there is a growth question and the growth question was not significant in when marx is writing my main thing now is it's an incredibly important question there are certain limits that can about growth so the question of the stability of this system arises partly out of that now one of the things here is that if you want a compound growth capital can take various forms it can be the money form it can be commodity form it can be production activity so it takes those three different forms which form can expand without limit well it's the money form actually and there was a very important moment in capitols history when it abandoned a material base for the amount of financial system which is August of 15th 1971 when the u.s. went off the gold standard after that what could you do you could just add zeros to the money supply any time you want you can start playing games with the way that with them and money supply and the result of that is being that there's been a great shift in the dynamism and and of this system in Volume one of capital the driving force is the individual entrepreneur looking for profit yes volume 1 volume 2 about realization well you got to manipulate consumer demand how do you do that well it turns out when there was a real problems of manipulating consumer demand like in the 1930s then you have to come up with a way of creating demand and who does that the state so suddenly you find the state becomes a driver it devour it drives the demand its create it it subsidizes the building of the suburbs the building of the suburbs go on and then all the demand that flowed from that then flows back into the economy so a driving force then becomes the state but where does the state get the money from if it lies only on taxes it couldn't do it so what does it have to do it has to go to the bankers and say give me some money where do the bankers get it from I can invent it they can invent it and they do and they invent money and actually come back in this kind of way so that's the second driving force so the third driving force it lies over in the field of distribution and I would like to argue and this is the financialization it was essentially a recognition that the driving force of the state was no longer significant and no longer able to stabilize this system and the driving force had to be relocated within the financial apparatus because otherwise the system would have fallen apart and the great thing about you know this is that if if money has a metal base then there's a restriction and Marx talks about this restriction and says you know every speculator in the world wants to sort of a get out the monetary constraints but he says they break their head on on it because you cannot get you can never abandon the metallic base says Marx he was dead wrong it got abandoned and what happened well in that case you simply add zeros to the world's money supply and you keep on adding zeros and you can add more zeros and that's what quantitative easing is that's what a lot of the things that go on at the same time there are also the ways in which life gets connected to actually being over there in the distribution field and forcing your way down through production to try to create more value through production give you an example I have a pension fund pension funds are all over in that distribution field what do they do they just don't sit there with their money they go out there and say we need we need to get a rate of return on this and they have a fiduciary obligation to get the highest rate of return and if the highest rate of return means that you actually employ labor in all kinds of awful ways and that's the way you do it so I end up with you know I'm in tiaa-cref and I find it's doing all sorts of horrible things you know and so so so there's a huge pressure comes from that area to find and and actually what this is is the use of what I call anti value or debt finance to push this system debt is a claim on future value and in fact you saddle the whole thing with debt and that replicates the system because we're now going to pay off all that debt I mean as students if you've got student loan you know what I'm talking about right I mean this is this has been going on in all areas of our life in fact what's happened is that the power of this system now resides entirely in the distributive field it lies in what I would call the state finance Nexus which is the nexus of bank serves as central bank plus plus the Treasury this is this is where the real power of this system lies backed by of course all the pension funds and all everybody who needs to get some some extra money out of financial operations and this leads into all kinds of other ways in which money can be got it leads to the possible of a huge amount of dispossession of populations by in a sense thievery the sort of thing that George Soros did when he bet against the the value of the pound in 1992 and in seven days he made a billion dollars something of that kind seven days now why would you bother to go to work if you could make no I'd mentioned this to students I say how do you do that how do you do that well this is this could only happen if you don't have a monetary base of the gold and you can allow these guys of this kind of stuff to go on so you get a lot of thievery and robbery which is going on through the financial system it's legal Soros didn't do anything illegal went when it when he got a billion dollars but but who lost the billion dollars well the British public lost a billion dollars so this is stealing from one bunch of people by financial manipulation and the other side of this is that we're increasingly lost in what I would call debt peonage so one of the ways in which this system starts to operate is is the debt its debt driven and becomes very significant now final final point here where is their struggle in this system I mentioned crises can break out all over my answer is struggle can occur all over the place the classic Marxist question is ok struggle over value and surplus value production valorisation in production and that's a class struggle between capital and labor and you know we know a lot about that and it's a long history of thinking about that so ok that's one point a struggle what kind of struggles occur about realization actually these turn out to be very important for a number of reasons first reason is that you can appropriate value at the point of realization you don't make value but you can appropriate it there give the example that guy who took over a pharmaceutical company and and and turned the $7 pill into a seven hundred and fifty dollar pill that's at the point of realization that's extracting value at the point of realization without doing anything and and so you start to look and you see at the point of realization there's a lot of extraction of value going on and then that contradictory unity between production and you know and realization become significant because value can be produced in one place and realized somewhere else my Mac computer is made in in Shenzhen Foxconn gets only about a three percent rate of return on its capital Apple sells the computer in the United States and gets something like a twenty seven percent rate of return so actually the value is produced in China and realized in the United States and it's realized in a way whether that not only the Trangia graphical transfer of value and that's going on all the time through these kinds of mechanisms but that actually the place of realization then becomes much more significant Walmart for example organizes all of those producers in China and elsewhere IKEA does the same and they they get the value which is produced in all those different parts of the world and and then they bring it and they realize it in in the United States or Europe or wherever so the relationship between production and realization becomes very significant and then there are struggles over this who struggles over that price of that of that pharmaceutical pill and in who struggles what kind of struggle is it actually turns out it's not capital versus labor it's buyers vs. sellers and Marx points to this and says yeah you will get struggles up there but their buyers in between sellers and so I'm not quite as interested in that because I really like the class struggle stuff but my argument is well no you should be actually be concerned about the struggles that are going on over realization and those struggles go on over things like wants needs and desires and they spread back into the whole kind of question which exists there what kind of human nature I'll be dealing with and that is not an irrelevant question I mean one of the fortunate things if you can call it that from Donald Trump being president it's asking what's a decent human being in this world you know and and you know there's this is this sort of issues arising about our species being our human nature what is it what does it mean I mean something put in sense what is it really mean to be in America and and is that the kind of person we are you know when we look at Donald Trump and all the kinds of stuff that he gets up to so he's that kind of person we want to be you know so there are struggles going on or in the background of this of this of this realization thing the same thing that goes on in terms of a distribution what kind of what kind of struggles exist in the sphere of distribution well there are the renters would anybody in Manhattan dispute the idea that there is a struggle to be had against developers and landlords and you know and those rat renters and so on I mean or would anybody deny that the struggles to go on against the credit card companies and against the telephone companies and all these sorts of things well there's lots of struggles going on over there some of its into capitalist I mean the landlord's don't necessarily operate nicely for the industrialists and there all kinds of conflict can can come in that kind of area but there's also this huge kind of question of who's managing and creating the debt how do we struggle against the power of the Federal Reserve how do we struggle against the power of the state finance and access and who does the struggling against that you know is this a class struggle in the ordinary sense or is it not and that to music again ever the important kind kind of a kind of question because the power of that Nexus is very very very significant I always remember in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Brothers when nobody knew what to do and the whole core economy is tanking you know Congress all disappeared and yeah the president disappeared and when pushes or something like that what whatever he did and and but the two people who came out and said here's what we do was Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson which is the chair of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury secretary and they came out with a three-page piece of paper and said this is what we're going to do this is how we're going to get out of it that was the that was that was the state finance Nexus being personified really speaking the state finance Texas days in the background doesn't want to be identified but that was a moment where it came out front said yeah Congress have looked at the three pages and said that's not long enough we'll convert it into a three hundred page document and and and Bush came along and said thanks very much I think we got this under control you know but but but in effect so so this is but who's going to deal with that and when you see what that is doing you look at something like what's happened to Greece or what was happening to also to Puerto Rico now made even even worse of course by when you look at what's happening you kind of say this struggles to be fought there there are struggles of course over the free gifts of nature and and and and and environmental struggles there are struggles over hue no human wants needs and desires there are all these sorts of things so this map is if you like a map of different kinds of struggles but the struggles are organized differently its capital versus labor and production is buyers and sellers its users versus abusers in in in the distribution field and and now we have a kind of interesting sort of question I'd be interested to see what Nancy would say to this we are changed the definition of class struggle and say okay it's all class struggle it's just it's not the same it was before well we say actually we might want to identify between anti-capitalist struggles which are all over the map and class struggles which have this much and a more narrower definition I don't know which way to go frankly I mean in a sense it sort of doesn't matter I think though it is important to understand the anti-capitalist nature of many of these are the struggles but it's clear that it's not all environmentalists or anti-capitalist it's not it's not that all feminists who are working on questions of social reproduction or anti-capitalist it's not as if all gays are anti-capitalist it's not as if you know everybody so the big question is how do we organize or think about an anti-capitalist struggle which unites many of these elements and is careful in relationship to all of these different issues which are absolutely significant and I I agree with Nancy on that 100% that their vital to be interpreted as we look at the whole kind of question of capitalism and what capitalism is about but at the core I still want to keep to Marxist notion that we should also recognize we ought to deepen our understanding of the depth of what capital is about so I like that separation between capital and capitalism I like Marx's theorization of capital because it actually does tell you in a very clear way what some of the real real problems are in in the dynamic of capital itself and it's like if that's the engine which is driving most of what we do then if the engine conks out then you know we're in a real mess that doesn't mean that can't be all kinds of struggles going on elsewhere to assure significant and which could also block this end up blocking this whole system the relationship between reproduction for example and labor supply is a kind of a very kind of interesting sort of dialectical relation this needs needs to be studied and looked at so that's where I'm at and I'd be interested to see how we proceed thank [Applause] okay well that was a really interesting deep and thoughtful so many points so I'm gonna just off-the-cuff mentioned a few things that struck me first of course this fundamental distinction that you've insisted on between capital and capitalism and I'm not sure how whether this is a third category or whether it's already in in capitalism but the phrase that I kept using was capitalist society and the reason I want to insist on that is because of the this question of institutional structure set these separations between economy and polity for example or production and reproduction to me this is part of the sort of the guts of what a capitalist society is as you know these things have not been sharply distinguished in an institutional way in non capitalist societies in pre-capitalist societies and some socialist societies tried to liquidate the economy polity separation in a way that was quite problematic perhaps but anyway so so I'm just want to sort of hear what you think about that third term of capitalist society is a second point is so what you're a lot of the things that I call the the background conditions you're calling the here the contextual conditions the free gifts of nature or free gifts of human nature and I think where the public power element is sort of over on the distribution side over there and what I want to ask about that is whether I mean it seems to me that capitalism only works at all if it can appropriate or expropriate those things as gifts if not completely free maybe it's paying a little bit here and there but essentially by not paying the costs of reproducing those things and then you know we have all these environmental economists and and others and feminists economists who say well let's just internalize the costs that are being externalized and I want to know David what you think about that my hunch is that capitalism cannot actually internalize these costs and that and that's why I said that I mean this really gets to this question of production of value maybe this is really what the question is you're assuming that value is produced at the point of commodity production that it's surplus value I think I'm inclined to say that well wealth is transformed into value and in that sense value is produced also by this appropriation or expropriation in the form of free gift so but we may have a disagreement about whether all value really comes from commodity production or not that's my second point um I mean I've thought if that's right then I've thought it would be very interesting to try to historic the relations between value produced in production and value expropriated from elsewhere are in capitalism and in in I would say in mercantile capitalism the expropriation is a big big deal a lot bigger than value produced in factories where I was in what we call industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century maybe they to even out and maybe that's true as well in state-managed or social democratic capitalism but today don't you think that things are shifting again despite everything going on in China there is such an enormous you this is what you mean by financialization in in value that is I would say produced you may not like the word produced okay generated through expropriation whether it's by driving down wages destroying unions and and and and so on so that workers are no longer actually paid the average socially necessary cost of their reproduction but have to you use credit cards and you know mortgages and other things in student loans and and all the rest of it I mean to me that seems to be a big part of how accumulation works today it's it's you're I agree that that the banks are just you know printing money and so on but it's coming out of the hide of people and the people that it's coming out of the hide of I want to call the working class in an expanded sense not all of them are working in factories and not all of them are even in the formal economy but but but this gets to your last point about how to think about class struggle and struggles and this will be the last thing I say I [Music] think that the notion of class struggle has been thought of too narrowly within what I have been calling traditional Marxism and I'm not saying that's your Marxism I mean because of the focus of exploitation and the point of production and so on I I would say that propertyless people who are engaged in unwaged but socially indispensable activity in social reproduction or in maintaining the habitats cultivating the resources that capital expropriate sand funnels into the accumulation that that that the struggles around expropriation just to use a word there or dispossession as your turn those are class struggles even though they don't have it they're not at the point of production so and and to me it would be very important politically to try to promulgate this broader view of class I was struck in in the u.s. election season by the stark contrast between the way Donald Trump sort of projected an image of the working class it was white straight male Christian in mining manufacturing construction the versus the sort of image projected by Bernie Sanders which was of a working-class that was in the public sector could be in domestic labor could be in retail in in in agriculture and that was could be black brown female so the to me the question would be how to think about promulgating that that much more expansive view of what the working class is what class struggle is how exploitation and expropriation are intertwined and not separable how Capital links them and and write profits off of their Nexus and and I think this question of of why struggles erupt at these boundaries that I described and the the boundary sugars are class struggles often in this expanded sense but the by calling the boundary struggles of calling its attention to where they are anyway that that's an another way of thinking about your last point about social struggle David a lot of ground was covered but there's limits the I was gonna make a limits to capital kind of joke there but didn't really execute but imagine imagine I did your laugh but but I'm gonna hold you to five minutes to answer all that maybe actually four and a half cuz I just took 30 seconds for me okay one of the things I have not been very good at is looking at the institutional structure so I will I will cede whatever you want in terms of the division of labor I'm not well I I don't quite know how to sort of work with with with some of that so but I you're right I'm not spending enough time here on the institutional structure and I should spend more time in evaluating this the question of value wealth and all the rest of it I'm going to give a sort of strict Marx answer to that the theory of valuing Marx is not his theory of value it has no normative content and you when you're writing you have often very alert I think the questions of normative content of any of these conceptual apparatuses but Marx I think it really doesn't do that with the value theory the value theory he presents to us he's not his value theory it's his reconstruction of how capital values things and the answer is it doesn't care about a lot of things so a lot of things that you and I might care about and think of as valuable and they in in the ordinary sense of the word valuable capital doesn't care about capital I mean part of the story about what does capital care about the health and well-being of the labor for labor force the answer is no it doesn't you know if it's got a system which which means that the labor force is going to have very low life expectancy so what you know I'm in capital it's not a moral system as far as that's concerned so Marx's notion of value then is and and at one point or other he says to be a valuable person and in capitalism is a misfortune and the question I raised in the book is well if it's a misfortune why is it that so many people want to join this system by saying we are we want to join the value chain and be valuable but they don't obviously mean they want to be valuable in the Marx sense of capital sense they want another alternative idea of value and I'm fine with that but I think the thing has to be worked out not as a critique of Marx about value theory but saying all right well what is the value that we would like to see imported and utilized in the evaluation of production and this comes out in other in another sense too that one of the other points you're making is there's a big difference in Marx between price and value money he says he's very clear about this and I get sort of concerned that people don't understand this well enough money is a representation of value or an expression of value and as such it can betray value and in fact value price frequently does betray value and Marx talks about the contradictions which exists between value and price and what in effect happened when you start to go off of a price system which goes off a metallic base is that the price system starts to internalize its own dynamic and it floats free from the value in which point at which point people say well what's the point of the value theory the point of the value theory is to give you an to critique what's happening in the price world you know I mean conventional economics doesn't do this it's abandoned the value theory and as a result of that it has no standard of critique of what's going on and and and Marx's value theory which which I can go into if anybody wants but I mean is is rather different from classical value theory in fact Volume one of capital is a fantastic essay on value and what is or is not value and it's not enough to read that way I mean the first three chapters talk about value in the market the rest of Volume one of capital is very much taken up with what Diane Nelson calls the value theory of labor that is what does labor have to experience in order to obey the rules of value which have been set up in the market and the answer is of course you know everything you read in the Working Day which is disastrous what you read in about division of labor and how that gets reorganized and everything so so so Marx has has a value theory which is not the same as the labor theory of value if you like capital has two parts the first three chapters is about the labor theory of value and the other chapters that follow are about the value theory of labor and actually Marx's value theory is the contradictory unity of those two elements and how they are constantly in tension and in battle with each other Marx is a very dialectical thinking thinker and he thinks about in those in those terms so I think that the value question is very important and I I get into trouble because you know because I kind of say no Nature doesn't as far as Capitals concerned nature does not contribute value its value less as far as that's why it's called the free gifts and the same is true of social reproduction for their free gifts and capital doesn't value them don't want to value them it's only when society and this is you're coming back to your institutional structure when society says that value theory can't can't prevail in the way it is we have to limit it in certain ways by limiting the length of the working-day by changing conditions in the factory labor and and and assuring people have at least something to live on if they're unemployed those kinds of questions there's a societal kinds of questions which arise within capitalism but capitals capitals value theory is in is it does have that in herre base final final point I am inclined to take the last question in this way I think there are loads of anti-capitalist struggles around and I would rather talk about anti-capitalist struggle because class struggle in a way is such a tainted term I think for reasons you've mentioned that it's very difficult to have a this is maybe going back to your trotskyist past you know if you mentioned class struggle everybody says yeah well the workers you know so so I in order to avoid that I tend to kind of say okay look a struggle is rules at the point of production class approach appropriations exist at the point of realization class configurations of liabilities go on and the distributional feel but I still think production is we're gonna take a few questions so if you line up at either microphone mmm we can start taking questions I have two very quick things I'll just pose that may or may not be answered I guess one would be just the question of you know Marxist for 150 plus years have been focusing primarily on capitalist crisis and explaining the different types of capitalist crisis it seems to me there might should be more work done on capitalist stability in the way in which even if this system is unstable workers have a vested interest in maintaining its its stability so if you look at capitalism it's a remarkable period where you know worker disruption and struggle in any serious sense is more the exception than the rule because it rooted in this you know dependency between capital and labor and the last point on Nancy's comment was that I completely agree that there should be this expansive view of the of the working class to include people doing on wage work and so on but I think that still goes back to the question of the importance of talking about the point of production because of where the particular social weight of workers are and even if today we have this broader a correct conception broader conception of the world class it still might be that there's you know a hundred thousand workers whose social weight is equal to that of ten million workers not in any moral sense but just in the ability of let's say a small number of nurses people engaged in logistics and still longshore workers and so on to disrupt and then from the level of political strategy as opposed to analysis it seems to me that corn production is actually might be neglected today so we'll start one on the left and we'll keep you two minute okay hey thanks the most sort of compelling vision I've seen for like a future of socialism is very generally like a nationwide leisure class doing something like that is possible without subjective fiying people across the ocean on the right oh yeah my name is Andreas I'm a doctoral student at the new school my my question is about the realization of value and distribution and kind of how it relates to Nancy's idea of public power some heterodox economists have particularly in money modern money theory have challenged the idea that money is in after the when we transferred to a Fiat system after the gold standard that money's coming from banks or the private sector that this kind of notion that money grows off rich people and arguing that it's still the state that is issuing money and currency in our society and and so one of the things that they're arguing is that this belief it's what's limiting our ability to use money for public purpose and kind of redraw those boundaries of what money can be for so my question is on on your thoughts on that on you know whether money could be used for other other purposes I wanted to address particularly David with respect to the state finance Nexus that you were talking about first question is whether you see anything interesting or significant about the development of crypto currencies in connection with all of this which are aiming precisely to avoid the presence of the state in transit monetary transactions and then secondly a number of big money people are talking about how the way out of the inevitable coming crash that they are all waiting for is for the state to confiscate the savings and the pensions and so on of the entire population in order to pay that off I just wonder if you have a thought on that so well back to them for two minutes each and then we'll finish with the last four questions so if you an answer if you want to go ahead for two minutes well I actually want to reply first you am your own for your first couple of points III see the history of capitalism as a sort of set of punctuated equilibria where there are in school there regimes that are more or less stabilized things provisionally until they don't work anymore and then you get an outbreak of crises all over the place and I my idea is that the the restabilization x' that arise have to do with reconfigurations of that those boundaries of that institutional structure whether its market state or production reproduction whatever anyway I think we are in a period of crisis now where the neoliberal ization and financialization thing has just sort of let loose the the processes of consuming than the system's own background conditions the tiger eating its tail on the question about factories is to if not not just the point of production but the primary point of disruption that really depends I'm sure that's the case in China in the u.s. it might be that these new mega distribution centers would be a major point of disruption and all over Latin America people get a lot of mileage just by blocking traffic on major highways and they're not workers there at all so I mean I think the possibilities for disruption are multiple the real question is when do the broad mass of people see these things as just annoying and you know disruptive rather than emancipatory and speaking for them I think that's a more serious question I think the question that was raised about can we imagine sort of broad emancipatory and a progressive national class struggles in a way that are not even if not explicitly crypto anti others I think that's a really important question and it should go without saying that some form of internationalism is absolutely on the agenda and I mean a first step is obviously to stop scapegoating immigrants who are from what I can see I'll let the Economist say more about it or not responsible for driving down the wages of American workers but I think these are things that have to be these are alliances that have to be constructed politically by disseminating other interpretations about the about global capital and global finance that show it's the same strategy as with the expanded working class within one country showing that there is a a larger nexus that is fattening the 1% off of all of us and our only hope is to band together against it leisure question Marx's view of socialism was heavily towards the idea that free time was the kind of indicator of successful socialist world what's what's interesting is we have all kinds of labour saving time-saving devices around us our own society but one of the things comes very clear is it most people don't have much free time and we're going exactly the opposite direction the technology is about in our time saving and actually everything speeds up so that we have to move faster so so I think that the paying attention to that angle of what social society should be about is to me very important and whether you know the whole kind of question were the two two questions about there the crypto currencies and also about the uses of uses of money you know the representation of value is very much in question right now and one of the things I would want to say is that there is no such thing as a good idea that capital hasn't figured out a way to co-opt and so you'll find these ideas about local monies and of course Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and things of that kind which seem to have or thought to have emancipatory possibilities which then get seized upon by power structures and utilized in a non in a non democratic way which by the way again is something that Nancy talks about in the book a lot with questions of democracy which we haven't discussed but I think are important I'm actually pointed out myself that actually if we wanted to relieve the debt peonage should exist in society one of the things we would have to do is to abolish pension funds now this sounds weird but the problem is that the pension funds right now are wrapped up in actually pressuring the capitalist system to respond to giving a rate of return and I find that tiaa-cref has been involved in land grab activities in Africa and things like that it's this loop and it's going out to people saying we've got money you you go out there and use it the pension fund California funded a hedge fund to take over allo a huge sort of housing complex which the hedge fund then starts to exact some of the low-income population that's there and turn it into high value kind of renters some of the people are evicted are actually pensioners who draw their fari so in a sense we'll look at look at that an ad system but you have to be evicted from your house in order to maintain your pension I mean this is the kind of insanity of this whole this this this this whole economic system which is why I called the book the madness of economic reason because it again and again you find crazy things like this and and I think that but but getting rid of the pension funds would mean that well then the question will be how do we provide for the security of a population where there's no pensions well Social Security is not a pension fund Social Security is a pay-as-you-go system you turn it convert everything into a pay-as-you-go system in other words you expand Social Security structures and and pay for it through taxes so everybody has a decent kind of standard of living through through when they when they retire for that means in which case you abolish private pension funds and I don't think that's a bad idea but as Kathleen kind of mentioned some people think about this and say oh yeah well okay you know we capitalists we can do that and we can take all the money out of it so again be careful I guess I have to be careful what I wish for because the capitalists probably figure out a way to actually turn it to their own advantage and there I think also there is an interesting kind of question we talk a lot about the definition of the class is I don't have too much problem with defining the capitalist class right now I know who your thieving bastards are so so I and I think actually that's why I think anti capitalism is it was a more robust kind of way of thinking about things because it's everybody who's being screwed by by by those those people and there aren't that many of them and they you take you take the hundred top corporations and you take the hundred wealthiest families in the world and you've probably got about third half of the wealth of the world and they want more I mean that's the amazing thing they want more what hi thank you both for really thoughtful presentations my question is for Nancy in your sort of tripartite model that you have of social reproduction and polity and environment you talked about how thinking of capitalism and capitalist society in these terms could bring in feminism post-colonial post-colonial and critical race theory and political ecology I'm interested that that middle term wasn't political science it was the the models that are usually used for talking about imperialism and raychel capitalism and so my question is like where does imperialism fit within this I could see it fitting across all three of your categories and or is it you know is it just the overall model because I can see this sort of influence of Rosa Luxemburg and what you're talking about in terms of capitalism eating its outside so what are your thoughts on that without following back into some very crude Maoism her that kind of model of imperialism before I forget there's actually gonna be a reception six one one two on the sixth floor there'll be wine I imagine maybe a tasteful assortment of cheese you know I'm not sure but we could go there and find out you're on the Left hi thank you for the discussion so there is a new term perception which referring to like people nowadays can be producer and consumers at the same time which shows allotting the social media digital platform like Instagram Twitter you guys mentioned a lot in China China has really big digital platform like Taobao and ching tong so we're at the massive consumption behavior happens here so what do you think helps this theory and what do you think the world is changing social structure on the right yes I think that of course the important of social the question of social reproduction is very important today but I think celebrating 150 years of capital my understanding is that Marx conceptualized labour as a concrete abstraction and modified by the ways in which the con the form of property was modified in that particular system and in that sense all social relations became mediated by the commodity form so and that includes production and reproduction and so that's what he is doing at the beginning of Volume one of capital is conceptualizing labor in that way as a concrete abstraction from a dialectical perspective and then at the end of the book when he describes the primitive accumulation he describes three phases of the enclosures and then colonialism in the bloody laws of forced labour so in a way when he's talking about free labor he's being sarcastic in a way he's saying that is no such thing as free labor in capitalism and he was describing all forms of slave labor together with forced wage labor so I think this is an interesting maybe way to rethink how we can utilize those concepts perhaps to look at production and reproduction at the same time so I'd like to ask your view on that and I'm sorry the final questions on the right yeah my question is for David Harvey and it sort of follows on that question I totally get what you're doing here and I'm gonna ask you a question to push it so why is this not a model of the economy why is this not because I don't think this is a model of the economy and I've always called myself a Marxist based on volume one and if you ask me well why are you a Marxist there why isn't are you just talking why's Marxism not just about the economy I could always answer that because I would say it's about the relationship between capital and labor and about how capital organizes labor and so forth I'm an historian and I could always point to the rise of the bourgeoisie the bourgeois state pledge white domination Rises the working-class and so forth so my question is when you expand it in the way that you have which I find very compelling and very important and very coherent how then would you distinguish this for when you and then you say it's a it's a theory of capital well then how then would you distinguish that from an economic theory of capital how capital reproduces itself and so forth where is the dividing line that makes this actually a social and historical theory and not just an economic theory question I have some views on that but that's another question I think that I think that you know there's the speeding up of a lot of this is is creating all kinds of strange compressions and I think the idea that prosumer which Alvin Toffler came about with some years ago is significant more and more as consumers we're actually having to produce their own around goods a menu we have to check ourselves out at the supermarket we have to check ourselves in at the airport we find ourselves having to do more and more things we get less and less service for anything and you know we find ourselves being put in a position of a prosumer this is you know when you come up with a schema like this immediately people will ask all kinds of questions about it including the last one but but one of them it'll always be well what happens when these things merge when when when the contradictory unity between production and realization sort of just collapses and what happens when when people don't even bother a reverse and instead of it being the real sub some you go back into a formal subsumption into the labor process in the way that Google does now what we actually produce a lot of the information which Google then gains and rents out so they become Ron tears they move for distributional kind of position so there's a lot of things happening in contemporary capitalism of that sort which are a consequence of speed-up and consequence of but again I would say their consequences of something I think for example going off the gold standard was not an accident and it wasn't just it was wasn't contingent it was a necessity at that moment in for capital's history I had nowhere else to go and it went there and were the consequences that have flowed ever since of all of this robbery that's going on not only saw us but all of the robbery that goes on through structural adjustment programs visited upon you know poorer countries where they have to sort of sacrifice whatever value they have to to the money for the money gods I think that there are the whole kind of question of a concrete abstraction i I didn't really mention this very much but Marx is very clear the one advantage that we have as investigators of social systems is the power of abstraction we can't run controlled experiments but we can use abstraction and so Marx is very clear that the abstraction how we create those abstractions is terribly important concrete labor and taking labor as a construct a concrete commodity and so all of those concepts are set up so that they are sort of idealized material events Marx's argument is its material but he needs a night the active exchange for example is seen as an idealized sort of a material event from which he then derives all the forms of value which then come much later so yeah he's doing all this kind of thing and he's not talking either he's talking about a logical way of trying to descent dismember the actual dynamics of what capital is about now this brings me to the last kind of question as to what makes this I'm not sure whether this is or is not an economic theory I'm not you know terribly concerned about that I want to try to figure out how to understand capital I would suggest however that the volume one artist is a problem that actually don't you think it's just as important to look at the whole history of creation of wants needs and desires don't you think that's as significant as the history of what the working class is about I'm not saying the history working class is irrelevant it's terribly relevant but then the question of arising which arises and as arisen since Marx of how do you buy off a significant element of that working class through consumerism and why is it that the concept that Marx does advance right at the end of volume two of rational consumption which is consumption which is rational from the standpoint of capital not from the standpoint of workers but compensating consumerism then becomes absolutely vital and we actually now live in a society where those kinds of questions become really upfront and if we don't put them upfront then we miss out on interpreting many of the things around us look at most of the movements that have occurred over the last fifteen twenty years I mean the the sort of anti-globalization movement about what was that about what was Seattle about what about the working class or was it about living conditions and forms of life and all those broader broader questions and and what was gay Zi Park about what was the eruption in Brazil it wasn't about working-class kind of questions in the classical sense it was about the trials of trying to live daily life under conditions of appalling you know massive what urban life is about and lot of urban struggles are going on right now which are about politics of daily life and I think the politics of daily life is just as important as the politics of what goes on at the point of production all I want to do is not displace you know familiar Marx's story about what goes on in the point of production about to say there are other issues here and I share with Nancy very much this has to be done because otherwise we're not going to be able to speak to people about the questions that are really bugging them you know and I think this is an alternative history then has to be written about about and actually the cultural historians have got around to some of this I think doing some very good work on you know consumerist practices in the 18th century some of the things that went were built into the rise of the capitalist form so I I think that the the case is very strong and I think that actually I'm not going beyond Marx in this because I'm simply echoing what Mark said that he was thought was important but he was not dealing with it here and when he says that it means that you should do to go look at it and at some point or other it's an indication it doesn't it doesn't end the story it's an invitation to actually broaden the story and I and I think I share my reading of Marx is it's full of those invitations to broaden the story what I'm tired of his Marxist who actually want to narrow the story and I think we both share a frustration about that that has happened to Marx and I think as you put it that that withdrawal from Marx and from these other questions to sort of bubble up and start to become so significant that became impossible to ignore them and and now we can may be in a position to put it back together in a more synthetic kind of way last point I mean we've gotten to the point where these two very impressive biographies of marks by spur Burns and Stedman Jones are both argue that Marx is irrelevant sorry that that it's it's it's only of historical interest precisely because of this sort of narrowed interpretation I wanted to just make one comment which I hope will address both the question about imperialism and the question about social reproduction as I see them they're both closely related I see Marx and I think this is right as being somewhat ironic but also quite serious about talking about free labor it doesn't mean free of susceptibility to coercion but it does mean a free legal status and eventually citizenship access to a least a limited set of liberal rights and the ability to call on state protection when those rights are violated now what that means to me is that having once been expropriated through enclosures or other forms of dispossession a certain segment especially of the sort of male majority nationality working classes achieved this kind of legal status but that they are a kind of the tip of an iceberg of a much broader mass of dependent and unfree and subordinated labor that did not have that status I think that's a large part of how I would understand imperialism as either being under direct colonial rule and therefore not having the status to in in a sense to be viable to be subject to expropriation not once and then you become a free worker but again and again and again I think this has a great deal to do with the color line and with the whole question of race I would say that it the United States today people of color remain ex propria bol and viable in ways that white people do not although white people are increasingly expropriated through debt and subject to forms of debt peonage if you like as well and I think this has also a lot to do with the ambiguous status of women within capitalist societies throughout its history so basically what I'm talking about is how the political and the economic intersect you can be expropriated because because you lack the political status that enables you to call on protection from expropriation and and therefore be only exploited that's how I understand race imperialism and in a more complicated way even aspects of gender all there for coming and especially of course to our speakers and please do join us on the in the sixth floor it's six one one two there's also a book

Channel: Place Culture Politics

Views: 19,224

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Keywords: davidharvey, nancyfraser, capitalism, marx

Id: 3ECQl8ufsHY

Length: 118min 45sec (7125 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2017

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SPIRALLING OUT OF CONTROL: ON THE FATE OF CAPITAL AND CAPITALISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: A CONVERSATION BETWEEN NANCY FRASER AND DAVID HARVEY