HARVEY: Marxism is a theory of capital
accumulation. The theory says basically the history of capitalism is about its increase
and its expansion. The way in which it expands by profit-seeking so that it has to grow. And
so the total economy of the world back in 1950 was about nine trillion dollars and it's
now closer to 90 trillion dollars. So you get some notion of the sort of rapidity of the
expansion. And capital has to expand or die. And under those conditions everything that goes
on under capital is very much about trying to accommodate to that expansionary pressure. So that
we get all these pressures on the environment, we get these pressures on increasing labor supply, on
increasing consumerism, on increasing everything. Everything has to grow, grow, and grow. And
what Marxism kind of says is, well first off, you can't grow forever, particularly at an
exponential rate. And as you grow you start to create all kinds of particular problems of
the environment. And when Marx was writing, capital was established in a very small corner of
the world, which was Western Europe, and Britain, and the Eastern seaboard the United States. And
now, of course, it's everywhere. It incorporates China, it incorporates what was once the Soviet
Union. So we're living in a world which is in the spiral form of expansion. And that creates
all these stresses, and then that creates geopolitical stresses. Now, since 1945 essentially
the world (the "Free World" as it was then called) was basically dominated of course by the United
States. And U.S domination continued up until about the 1980s, 1990s. And now we find ourselves
in a situation where the US, I think, is being threatened. Its domination is being threatened by
China by, actually, developments around the world in general. And so there's a sort of desperate
attempt, it seems to me, by the U.S establishment to try to maintain its position somehow or
other. And in particular I think about the war in the Ukraine which is horrible in terms of its
implications and what's happening and everything-- Which I don't think I'd have to sort of
go into that in order to say that I tend towards the pacifist end of things. But on the
other hand there are such things as just wars, but this is a very unjust war. And the big problem
is how to bring it to an end. There's a lot to be said about how it came to be, but how can it be
brought to an end? And I think, actually, my view would be that it could be brought to an end by
the G20 pressuring the two leading powers in the world (which are China and the United States) to
actually make sure that this comes to an end. But my fear is that the United States doesn't want it
to come to an end. I really think that actually it sees this possibility as a moment in which it can
reassert its hegemony in the world. And this was said specifically by one of the generals who kind
of said "our objective," he said "in the Ukraine thing is to diminish and degrade Russia's military
capacity so that they will never be able to intervene in the world again." And now (and this
is very much what the US is about) they're taking the same attack economically with China, by trying
to limit the availability of high-tech and uh chip making and all the rest of it. So what we're in is
a very, very dangerous situation right now where something that could be brought to an end by the
US and China sitting down and saying "how can we put pressure on both sides to end this?" they're
not going to do that because the United States right now doesn't want to do that. It's actually
benefiting a lot from fighting a proxy war against Russia and this proxy war has all of these
terrible, terrifying kinds of aspects to it which I think I'm sure everybody in the audience would
want to see brought to an end as fast as possible. What do you think, Rick? WOLFF: Well, I'm sure there'll be things where
we disagree but in nothing you've said do I find any basis for disagreement. Let me take it a
little bit further and talk about the specific contribution, in a sense, that Marxism makes that
lies behind so much of what you've just said. If you read the mainstream story about post-world War
II development right up until Ukraine and the role now China plays, whether it's from the left or
the right, one of the things [that's] immediately obvious to you, if you look at it through a
Marxian lens, is the absence of any reference to capitalism. We are told these events happen
because Xi Jinping has this or that objective politically. We're given psychological profiles of
Mr Putin or Mr Zelensky, or we're told that this all has to do with freedom, decency, and equity.
I'm struck by the speech of President Biden a few days ago and and echoed by his officials about
how it's all peace and freedom and democracy that we're fighting over, while they were signing the
arrangements to let the leader of the Saudi Arabia get out from under culpability for the murder of
that reporter [Jamal Khashoggi] a few years ago. I mean, that anyone would take it seriously is now
in doubt, and I'm glad of it. But what Marxism does is say, "no, there needs to be an underlying
explanation." You have to root what you're saying about Ukraine, China, and so on in the Marxian
apparatus which puts the question of capitalism, and how it works, and why it works that way
right in the core of the explanation. It's not the only thing, it's not it's not meant to
exclude all manner of other subjects. But the exclusion of the capitalism feature is what our
counterparts, what our conservatives and liberals, are busy doing. And it seems that for me
what's interesting (and where I love what David was saying), is that you're beginning to
ground the conversation in questions of capital accumulation. How is that accumulation going? In
capitalism's history it's fraught, for example, with terrible instability. Every four to seven
years there's a crash. Large numbers of people are thrown out of work, these people want a
job but they don't get one. A quarter of our industrial capacity, for example, in this country
is now not being utilized. We have enormous unmet social needs and we have a society that can't put
together, as Marx stressed, the unemployed people, the unused capacity ,and the need for output for
all the different social problems that we have. And what does a society do when it's confronted
with the problems, or as Marx might have called them, the contradictions of capitalism?
Weaving that into the analysis is, I think, what a study of Marxism enables and provokes you
to do. And it's an enormous corrective to the superficiality of what goes on in the mass
media with these real crises that we face. HARVEY: I agree entirely with that and I
think that you can look at this also in a couple of different ways. At the same time
as this war is going on in Ukraine there are kinds of maneuvers going on within capital
which are very distressing. For example, Ukraine has been granted absolution from its debts
for a couple of years from many major powers. But in return for that it has to open up all of its
lands to purchase by foreigners. Because in 1999 it found that-- The Ukraine is a very rich country
and it has a huge kind of productive capacity, particularly with respect to food grains. And
all of the agribusiness wants to get in there and own that land and take it up and monopolize
it. And so what Ukraine found itself doing was to prevent foreign ownership of the land. And it
legislated that back at the end of the 1990s. But in return for this [present] largesse, in terms
of the debt retirement, basically what Ukraine has agreed to is to allow foreign interests
to completely enter in and control the land. The same thing has happened in the labor market.
The labor market used to be working under a kind of ex-Soviet lines. Now it's neoliberalized.
So in effect, one of the things that's going on at the same time as this war is going on is the
total neo-liberalization of Ukrainian Society. So this is again, you know, the US and everybody else
pushing that economic process. Now I'm not saying that's the only thing going on, but when you start
to look at these things you start to see that actually these economic interests are terribly
important. You know, all the big agribusinesses, Cargill, Monsanto, and so on, would love to get
in there and own all that and monopolize the grain trade. And because Ukraine has about a big
chunk of the global grain trade. And actually that in itself, by the way, may be one of the reasons
why this will come to an end, because shortage of food grains and food security around the world
is becoming a big issue. And the G20 folk are beginning to say, "hey, listen this is getting
dangerous for all of us and so something has to be done to bring it to [an end]." And again, I
don't want to sound like an economic determinist but the interesting thing is, as you said,
everything is personalized and it's about Putin's personal vision versus Zelensky's and so on, when
actually there's a lot of economic force going on under the radar, as it were, to have major
impacts on how the global economy is going to function. And I think right now we may be headed
into a crisis form, but the crisis this time will be partially as a result of the interruptions
in food security at the global kind of level, and that is a kind of crisis in which we're
already seeing famine going on in large parts of Africa. And we're beginning to see these these
sorts of issues cropping up around with people kind of saying "how did that happen?" Well, part
of it happened because this is a capitalistic War. And it's about wars of economic systems. And of
course partly the whole conflict with China is the war over the nature of the economic system
and how their economic system is going to work. But that's again something which I think we
should be paying very close attention to. WOLFF: Yeah again I would add one wrinkle to all
of that. Capitalism is full of contradictions. Whatever it does to advance or solve
a problem (in a nod to Hegel) creates yet another problem. And let me give you an
example following up on what David just said. France has a very interesting institution,
25 years old, it's called the Ecole de Guerre Economique. The school of economic warfare.
And they've just issued a report last month and here's the contradiction it highlights.
I'm going to now summarize. But Marxism, the lens through which I make sense of the
world, is what brought me to that Institute, to that report, and to what I'm about to say
to you now. That report says that the biggest danger to France as a capitalist system (which
is recognized by them) is the United States. Not China, not Russia, [but] the United
States. It actually lists, in rank order, the dangers. Why? In their view (and these are
people with the closest possible linkages to the largest capitalist interests in France, okay?)
if in their view the war in the Ukraine is not only as David said something in the United States
seems to want in an open-ended kind of way, but is part of economic Warfare against Europe. And
they don't want to be part of it. They see that the absurd surge of inflation as having to do with
the sanctions that the Americans wanted to put on Russia. They went along with it, but now they're
suffering the consequences. The Russians aren't, the Americans aren't. The actual protagonists are
both solving their technical difficulties with their policy but Europe is left with politicians
hung out to dry because they went along with it, even though their people now can't get the food
they want, can't get the energy they want, can't get the gasoline they want. And they're angry and
they don't want Mr Macron to continue. It's part of the reason why Macron is already playing kind
of both sides, if you watch what he's doing. And I think you're going to see we may be surprised this
time with a relative decline of the United States, the relative rise of China, that the ability to
ride roughshod over the junior partners of the Western Alliance, that may be very much fractured
in the years ahead. And I think that the Marxian analysis of the accumulation problems for the
Europeans... The report by this Ecole de Guerre Economique also makes the point, with bitterness,
that the United States, in their view, has dropped Great Britain as the long-standing ally to sort of
manage Europe, and that the Germans now want to be in that position, which is why they have reversed
their policy become big gung-ho supporters in Ukraine. Notice, has nothing to do with Ukraine.
It goes back to David's first point. They're trying to solve the problems of a capitalism in
trouble and they're trying to figure out how to do that, and the Ukraine is only interesting
if it helps rather than hinders that process, and they're coming to the conclusion that by
and large it's hindering that process for them. How that works out in the realm of Ukraine war
there's no way to predict. But the old alliance with the United States at the helm, that's
being questioned and challenged from all sides. HARVEY: And one of the theoretical points that I
would-- (and you may disagree with this), but one of the theoretical points that I have worked
with a lot is this idea of overaccumulation, and the problems of the surplus and the absorption
of the surplus over time. And what Marx does at a certain point is to start to kind of say the
surplus which is used to generate more surplus is problematic. And so there have to be some "sinks,"
if you like, in which you can get rid of surplus in various ways. And there's a wonderful point in
the Grundrisse where he says if you really want to get rid of overaccumulated capital then going
into war is a good way to do it. He said because going to war is just like chucking surplus into
the ocean. And so actually wartime activities-- And this is again something I want to emphasize
to people. When you see this headline that says 'United States is giving 40 billion dollars to
Ukraine' actually what it's doing is giving 40 billion dollars to the defense industry in
the United States to build the stuff to send Ukraine. So there's a wonderful kind of way
in which the surplus is being disposed of, but being disposed of in such a way that it
increasingly centralizes capital in these large industrial corporations which are producing
armaments and high-tech kinds of things. So that so that this kind of over accumulation idea
is terribly important and it leads into one of the phrases I use, this idea of a "spatial fix."
That when you get a country and you've absorbed, saturated it with capitalist development you
start to go abroad. And suddenly you start to see the export of capital abroad and all that kind of
thing. So how to dispose of the surplus? Do you do it by geographical expansion which gets you into
imperialist politics at a certain point? Do you do it wastefully by going to war and, you know, in
effect checking their surplus into the ocean? So all of these things are going on at the same
time as we start to see this this global economy which is kind of teetering around in the ways you
say, lurching towards some sort of crisis which is likely to be a crisis either on the supply
side (which would be food deprivation and all of the things which which are coming out of the the
current situation) or whether it's about sort of over accumulation and all of the problems
of over accumulation that come out. I mean, through this expansion, by the way, we get this
also connection to the ecological problems and the degradation of of of the environment and climate
change and all the rest of it. So that the theory of over accumulation to me is terribly important.
It's part of that aspect of Marxist theory which, I think, plays a very crucial role in this
geopolitics and geopolitical struggles which are going on around the world between different
countries as they jockey for positions in this kind of situation. And again, Marx has a nice
kind of thing where he says when things are when everything's going fine all the capitalists
are friendly with each other. The capitalist corporations love each other. Capitalist countries
love each other. When the downturn comes they all hate each other and they try to dump the
consequences of the downturn on somebody else. So we're in one of those situations right now
and I think this is why it is so dangerous when you start to connect the economic imperatives
with the geopolitical geo-economic imperatives. WOLFF: And yet that's one of the great
strengths of Marxism, that it will not let you look at an issue like a war or any other major
social issue without asking and answering questions: Where is the surplus? Who's producing
this surplus? Who's getting that surplus? How do they distribute this surplus? What are the
social effects of how the surplus is organized? And you know, coming out of the academic economics
world I have to tell you (because it's stark) my colleagues, my education at all the fanciest
universities, there was no discussion of the surplus. The surplus doesn't exist. If you look
in the index of all the major textbooks that I have had to use to teach my classes, you can't go
through the index and find "surplus," or if you do, it's weird notions of psychological surplus
that consumers have. But nothing remotely like it. It's a refusal of the profession to weave into
its analysis what Marx was able to contribute: an insight into the production and distribution
of surplus. It's a fantastic contribution on a scale every bit as powerful as say Sigmund
Freud teaching us that we have multiple levels of consciousness. We have a consciousness,
a subconscious, and unconscious, and how to think about them. Spectacular rethinking of
the human experience. That's what Marxism is.
