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- [00:02]
A
Welcome friends, to another edition of Economic Update Extra. We're going to be continuing our conversation with Professor David Harvey to pick up exactly where we left off in this conversation. So David, I wanted to ask you what you think of this endlessly repeated mantra that yes, capitalism globally crashed in 2008 and 9, but that we are now happily engaged in a great recovery and should understand that that sad moment, oh yes, maybe even that sad few years is now well behind us and it's upward and onward from here. How do you respond to this kind of story?
- [00:49]
B
I think it's a perfectly true story. If you happen to be in the top 1%. If you're anybody else, it's a bunch of lies. And this is the thing that is really kind of astonishing right now is that the inability to recognize that the class perspective which you and I tend to utilize is so revealing about what story makes sense from what perspective. And it is indeed true that the rich have become much, much richer since 2007, 2008. They've used the mantra of never let a good crisis go to waste and they've improved their wealth and power by all sorts of means. So of course they say the crisis is over because for them the crisis is over. For the rest of us, people are struggling. And even though there is, quote, full employment and we know that that's a bit of a sham, but even though the employment situation is better, it's meaningless. Jobs that are being created, many people are working 60 hour weeks, many people are actually finding it almost impossible to find a place to live because rents and all the rest of it have gone sky high. And one of the reasons rents have gone sky high is because there was something called quantitative easing where the central banks threw a whole bunch of money out into the and said kind of get on with it. And what happened to the money? It went into the stock market, propped up the stock market, it went into the property market. So everything, every major metropolitan area in the world has had a boom in property and values to the point where actually if you're an ordinary person in San Francisco or New York or Melbourne or Vancouver, you can't find a place to live because you haven't got enough income to actually support the kind of money you need to actually get a two bedroom apartment.
- [02:46]
A
But it's then amazing that the recovery, for me, it's almost like a cruelty to go to the mass of people and tell them endlessly that they're in a recovery will sooner or later force them to ask the question, but not me. Why Am I not in it? And then, unfortunately, this society seems to have the answer. It's your fault. In other words, there is a recovery. We know that because we keep repeating it. If you're not participating, it's you.
- [03:20]
B
It's because you did not invest in yourself as an entrepreneurial individual. You didn't invest in, didn't go to.
- [03:26]
A
The right capital, accumulate the right degrees.
- [03:29]
B
You didn't take out enough debt and all the rest of it. Yeah, no, it's just kind of.
- [03:33]
A
It's your personal failing. It makes the fact that you're suffering worse. It adds almost a. A kind of psychological manipulative, torture to the situation.
- [03:44]
B
And then, of course, they were very surprised that there's a real escalation in suicide rates and opioid addictions and all the rest of it. So you've got a real social crisis on your hands and the roots of it lie very much in these processes you're talking about.
- [04:03]
A
Let me go back to the question on the regular program that I asked you. What is the future for Marxism as a way of thinking in the world as you see it today, given all your experience over the years? Where is this tradition of thought going in your.
- [04:21]
B
Well, it can go in a number of directions. And I think one of the big questions for you and I is how to make the Marxist way of thinking clear, easy to understand, but also at the same time to use it to creatively in relationship to what's going on around us in daily life. And I think that if we can do that, we can start then to sort of provide mental conceptions which are conducive to the movement of a political sort that can actually start to define some alternative to this crazy capitalist system which now has got to the point where it really needs to be challenged. Because we have some real major contradictions. For example, compound rate of growth forever. Forget it. Physically, we're now at a boundary and we need to figure out how to stabilize the global economy around current structures of usage. We cannot expand at the same rate as we've been expanding for the last 150 years.
- [05:30]
A
Where is this going to happen? In other words, do you see different places in the world either where capitalism is developing in different ways or the critique of it so that Marxism will have purchase, will be able to prosper and develop itself?
- [05:47]
B
Well, we have an opportunity right now. I mean, when I talk about mass alienation, I think what you see in countries all around the world, I mean, in Brazil, for example, I encounter mass alienation in the population. You're saying is, and one of the things that's happening is that people turn to the right and they start to go to the fascistic nationalist right. And so we see the rise of Orban, of Erdogan, of Duterte, Bannon, all the rest of it. So we're beginning to see the capturing of alienated populations who are looking. And it's not a technical kind of problem so much as it's a give me meaning in life. What is the meaning of my life. And the liberals have not come up with a way of defining meaning, whereas the right wing, through nationalism and through this idea of kind of almost racial superiority, which is quietly there, or gender superiority, have in fact come up with a kind of structure of meaning which is very attractive to people who are in desperate situations. We on the left have to come up with a structure of meaning and not just simply a political policy. We have to come up with something that's meaningful. And if we can do that, and I think Marx was great at actually getting us to think about how to do something like that, if we can do that, then this world would be a very different place from the way it's headed right now.
- [07:16]
A
Do you think there may be a kind of. I'm trying to think of the best way to say this. If masses of alienated people turn right for the reasons you've just given us, is it also not possible that as the right, given who they are and who they serve, cannot and will not change the economic crisis that those masses of people are in, that they will turn elsewhere because the right that waving a nationalist flag does not put food on the table, et cetera, et cetera, that there will be an opening to the left waiting right behind the failure of the right to solve the problem?
- [07:56]
B
I think the opening to the left is already there. I don't think we wait for the right to fail. I think we talk about to alienated populations directly and say you are being given a false story about why this is going all wrong. The real problem here is capitalism. It's not your fault, it's not the fault of immigrants and it's not the fault of foreign trade tariffs. That is not the problem. The problem is capital accumulation is in a certain kind of crisis and we have to find a way to out of this and we have to therefore mobilize. Again, around the question of alienation.
- [08:38]
A
A comment drawing on your use of Marxian theory, would the following sentence make sense to you? That the centers, the original centers of world capitalism, England, Western Europe, North America, Japan, Excuse me, are now being. Well, I'll use strong language. Abandoned. That the center of capitalism has somehow moved away to the Indias and the Brazils and the Chinas and so on. That the economic growth, the spectacular rates of growth, the emergence of large numbers of millionaires, a whole host of signs might lead you to suspect that the center of gravity in some sense has moved from the origins to new areas, leaving the mass of the working classes in Western Europe, North America and Japan a sea with a correct sense that they are being abandoned and they're angry and bitter. Does any of this.
- [09:41]
B
Well, I think from, again, the class perspective is important. From the perspective of the working class, what you're saying is true. From the perspective of the 1%, it's not true because I think they sit at the top. The center of power lies in a lot of financial institutions. It's still the case that the Federal Reserve in the United States is the center of much of what global capital accumulation is about. And I think that there are plenty of very, very rich people around in the United States and in Europe and in Japan who are doing very well and will continue to do very well because they've managed to isolate them in gated communities or way out in these sort of pleasure domes that they have, or they have. Like many people, they have multiple homes, one in London, one in New York, one in the Caribbean, and one in California or something like that. So they're doing fine. And I don't think that has been decentered at all. Whereas I think working for working people, the centre has indeed moved. It's moved to China and it's moved to Thailand and it's moved to Cambodia and it's moved to the Philippines and it's moved to Mexico. So, yeah, for the working people, the picture is correct, but I think when we put the class perspective, we see it differently.
- [11:06]
A
How do you react to the demonization of immigrants? This extraordinary moment in human history where the old narrative of immigrants as initiative, people with initiative, people with whatever it takes to leave a bad situation and bring their urgent creativity to make countries like the United States and others that experience explosive growth, suddenly the immigrant is a threat, a danger, a dark, criminal element. Well, how do you understand this?
- [11:43]
B
Well, the immigrant historically has been the great success story in capitalist history. And this is the bizarre thing that now we have political power mobilizing behind certain fragments of capital that want to defend themselves by actually demonizing the immigrant, because that's the only way they can pretend, protect themselves from being demonized directly.
- [12:09]
A
Themselves as the cause of the problem.
- [12:11]
B
If we, if we demonize the Koch brothers as opposed to the immigrant, then we would be in a very different kind of. Kind of world. But the Koch brothers and the like want us to demonize somebody else because this is deflection of what the true root of the problem is. Yeah.
- [12:31]
A
And you know, in a sense, capitalism ought to celebrate the immigrant. Absolutely, because the capitalist enterprise that starts in a few urban areas of Europe always drew its growth and sustenance from the immediate countryside, then from the bit further out country that immigration is central to whatever growth capitalism has ever achieved.
- [12:52]
B
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [12:53]
A
They ought to be raising the flag of appreciation.
- [12:55]
B
But yeah, but you see, the ultra rich are not really interested in capitalism doing well. The ultra rich are interested in their own class doing well, and the capitalist class can do extremely well, while capitalism in general is doing very badly. And I think that that is the situation we are in right now.
- [13:17]
A
Who would you point to? Classic political question from Marxists who are concerned about change. Where is, in your judgment, the change coming from now? Where would you guess? And it's, of course, no one knows the future. What's the constituency for change? Where is the change going to come from? Is it going to come from the old centers of capitalism, us, Western Europe, the new centers, the center, the periphery? Where. Where can we look? Or is that the wrong question?
- [13:52]
B
I travel around the world a lot, and wherever I go, I'm coming across groups who are trying to organize around what I would call almost heterotopic spaces, that is, spaces where something different can go on outside of capital. There's a lot of this going on all around the world. The big problem is, can it be all put together? Can people establish links with each other between what they're doing? People who are doing this in, say, the recuperated Factories in Argentina vs recuperated spaces in Greece vs recuperated spaces or solidarity economies elsewhere. Is there a way to put this all together? And it seems to me that there have been moments historically over the last few years where we've seen a mass global movement. Remember February 15, 2003, when millions of people all over the world said no to war? And it was an astonishing moment. Think of it for a moment, and then you kind of say, actually, would there have been other moments of that sort? I mean, to some degree, the World Social Forum mobilized some of this Occupy when it got going, produced lots of little occupies all over the place. And overnight, overnight, indignado movement in Spain suddenly spills over. I mean, so we've seen a lot of that. And the Gezi park occurred. And then three weeks later, the whole of Brazil is. I mean, there's a lot going on and there's a lot of possibility there and there's a lot of anger and there's a lot of possibility for moving something to the left. The big problem is to sit down and say, all right, what kind of programmatic way can we think about displacing, creating an anti capitalist movement that is a global anti capitalist movement and which really actually will take power in a very specific way.
- [15:49]
A
Thank you again, David. Really much obliged. You're sharing it.
- [15:52]
B
Yeah.
- [15:53]
A
And I hope you come back and join us again.
- [15:55]
B
Yeah, don't worry. I'll come back anytime you want.
- [15:58]
A
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