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David Harvey
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David Harvey (born 1935) is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He is the world's most cited academic geographer, and the author of many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. Consistently Marxist, his work has contributed greatly to broad social and political debate; most recently he has been credited with bringing back social class as a serious methodological tool in the critique of global capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal form.
1. Which aspects of Marxism's theoretical legacy definitively belong to the
past? Which aspects still seem urgent today?
This first question is difficult for me. Though most of my work has concentrated on Marx’s texts, I’ve never considered myself a great expert on the history of Marxism or the currents of thought in it. But what I drew theoretically from the study of Marx’s texts was that a good historical and geographical materialist has to confront the realities of his or her time and place and do an analysis of what is happening now, finding categories that help explain what is happening.
Good Marxist theoretical work always has to start with the situation as it is, and then find the conceptual apparatus that helps to unravel and unpack that situation. I have read many of the classic Marxist texts like Lenin or Luxemburg to see how they went about doing that. But I get very impatient now with ‘learned debates’ as to whether Luxemburg or Lenin was right. I think this habit of rerunning all the debates that went on 100 years ago is a waste of time. I want to come up with an analysis of what is happening now, because the world has changed. In one of the introductions to the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote that this is now a historical text and should be seen as an historical text of its time. And he said if we were writing something now, we would go about it quite differently. I think one of the big problems in the history of Marxism is a tendency to not to be fluid and adaptable to the present situation. I think this is particularly important because one of the big theoretical insights I get from Marx and his understanding of capital is how fluid and adaptable capital really is. That is, if you cannot make a profit this way, you will do it that way. If there is a blockage, then it will go here…I have extended this analysis to my own work to say that there is also a geographical dimension to this, that if capitalism is having problems in Britain then it flows to North America, and if it is having problems in North America, it flows to China or India.
As Marxists, we have to be very much more adaptable in our theorising and in our construction of our theoretical apparatuses. We can’t go back and say “Lenin said this and this was right.” Even if it was right at time, and sometimes it was not, it almost certainly is not right today. I think that this spirit of inquiry is terribly important if we want to be good historical, geographical materialists and we are constantly searching for the theoretical insight that is going to illuminate the underlying problems of a capitalist social order.
To that end I teach Marx’s Capital every year and I have to say that I find it very illuminating, particularly over questions like fetishism, the disguises of capital, how fetishism works, how alienation works and yet is disguised. But again, I find it important to reread it every year, and to reread it every year in relation to what is happening now. I teach Volume I every year and have taught it every year for the last 37 years. Every now and again, I teach Volumes II and III. This next year, I’ll be teaching the Grundrisse as well. The way I have taught it over these 37 years has changed because the situation has changed. I can orient the text towards what is happening now. In so doing, you see something about the text that you did not see before. So this is how I approach the theoretical legacy: I would like to keep as up to date as possible in relation to what is happening in my time and my place, which is mainly United States, Europe and Latin America. These are the places I am familiar with. So if I were reading here in Russia, I would start to see other things that I don’t currently see.
2. Which are the main theoretical problems that Marxism needs to solve at
present?
Again, I’ll go back to Volume I of Marx’s Capital. Much of that book is constructed as a dialogue with classical political economy. One of the surprising things to students when they read it is to find that Marx actually accepts the vision of a perfectly functioning market as laid out by Adam Smith or Ricardo. In a sense, he wants to show is that the closer you get to a perfectly functioning market situation, the greater the degree of class inequality. He wants to prove that Smith’s argument that the market would work to the benefit of all is wrong, that the market actually works to the benefit of the capitalist class, full stop. And the freer the market, the greater the returns to the capitalist class. So by the time you get to Chapter 25 about the general law of capitalist accumulation, you see an accumulation of wealth at one pole and an accumulation of degradation and toil and misery at the other pole on the part of the labourers that produce the wealth. This is a very important proposition, because after 30 years of neoliberalism in the West what you see is an uneven geographical development of the neoliberal line, and those countries which have gone very strongly neoliberal and have experienced exactly what Marx was predicting.
Mexico is one of my favourite examples as it went strongly neoliberal between 1988 and 1994. Mexico is a very poor country, but by the time you get to 1996 you find that 14 Mexicans are on the list of the wealthiest people in the world. The third wealthiest person in the world is a man called Carlos Slim who came out of the whole privatisation. Thanks to the neo-liberal project in Mexico in the 1990s and again in the US, the concentration of wealth at the top has become absolutely astonishing compared to the fact that wages have remained completely flat for the last 30 years. What you see in all of this is a theoretical argument that is extremely relevant to explaining the dynamics of capital at large.
But then what Marx does in the last part of Capital is to talk about the processes of primitive accumulation as if they largely occurred during the origins of capitalism, in the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the enclosure movements, in the destruction of the peasantry and so on. It seems to me, however, that those processes did not stop, that they continued. This is something that Rosa Luxemburg pointed out. For me, it became a very important argument in trying to interpret what the new neoliberal imperialism is all about. Because neoliberal imperialism is very much about new rounds of primitive accumulation that violate the market entirely. The section on primitive accumulation is talking about violence, some of it extra-legal. But then it talks about how state violence and legal violence become one of the major means of primitive accumulation. Then you look again at what happened in Mexico in 1988 where they took and enclosed the common lands of indigenous populations. The same thing happened in the 18th century. So is this primitive accumulation? How should we really think about it? Even in the US, common property rights were suddenly being taken away. Take pension for an example. People thought they had good pensions, but then a lot of corporations suddenly got rid of their pensions. They did this by declaring bankruptcy, which just means that you operate under a court order rather than go out of business. So big airlines like United Airlines would go to a judge and say, “We can only come out of bankruptcy if you allow us to get rid of all of our pension obligations.” And the judge says “Fine, OK.” So suddenly all those United Airlines employees who thought they had a pension suddenly don’t have one anymore. There is a state insurance scheme that is supposed to pick up the pension, but it only does so up to a certain point. So people who thought they would retire on $90,000 a year and were living on $90,000 a year suddenly found themselves living on $30,000 a year and couldn’t do it. So they found themselves rejoining the labour force at age 60 or so, basically re-proletarianised.
Do you call this primitive accumulation, or what should we call this? I decided to call it accumulation by dispossession. It is the taking away of assets, the destruction of assets. But as UA employees are losing their pension rights, people on Wall Street are earning $52 million a year. If you are head of Goldman Sachs you got $1.7 billion. So I started to think this category of accumulation by dispossession and then asked questions about how much of that is going on around the world right now. All of this includes issues like environmental degradation, loss of common property rights, and the privatisation of water supplies. It turns out there are vast struggles going on all over the world, as people try to resist accumulation by dispossession. Slum dwellers in Mumbai are being forced out of slums, if they are on high-value land that has suddenly become interesting to property developers. You have a similar situation in Russia, as entire areas are gentrified and are people forced out from various locations.
I thought it very important to include these struggles under the general topic of class struggle. This is a different kind of class struggle than the one that goes on in the factory. I think for me one of the big theoretical issues is to take up an idea I found in Rosa Luxemburg, of trying to talk about the organic link between these two kinds of struggles, and asking what the theoretical link between these two types of struggles would be. Was there a way to start to think politically about the unification of those struggles rather than what sometimes happens where people in the Labour movement say oh they are irrelevant, and people in environmental movement say the Labour movement struggle is irrelevant? Could there be some unification of this struggle on both theoretical and practical political levels?
When I started to look more closely at the kinds of struggles that have been central to the World Social Forum movement in last few years, many of them are about accumulation by dispossession. Some of them are quite hostile to the traditional labour movement as they feel the traditional labour movement has not supported them or taken them seriously. At the same time, you can see the possibilities of very real coalitions emerging. Just as Gramsci used to talk about coalitions of northern workers and southern peasants, we could now speak of coalitions between northern workers and many of the movements in the economic south. This is one area of theoretical and political analysis that I think needs a lot of attention.
I will say in passing that some of my traditional Marxist colleagues have not liked the fact that I have changed the language from primitive accumulation to accumulation by dispossession. They objected. Why change Marx’s language at all? Part of the answer was this: if I started about primitive accumulation to people in a farming community somewhere, nobody would know what I was talking about. But if I talked about accumulation by dispossession, they would know. Because many of them have lost their farms, and know what that means. They also know who has benefited. This is one of the areas where we need to change our language and shift our conceptual apparatus to embrace a different political situation and draw people to the politics we want to develop…
That is also why one of the main theoretical problems is that there is indeed a huge cultural gap. The languages are very different. One of the things academics can work on is to forge more of a common language. In my last two books, I was trying to pull together labour struggles and accumulation by dispossession by putting them in the same framework. But there is a tremendous amount of work to be done, and a lot of latent hostility. I have been to some of the social forum meetings, not the main ones, but the European ones, but people from labour unions were sometimes treated with tremendous hostility by the others and vice versa. When you ask yourself who the common enemy is, then that is the neoliberal form of accumulation. And if we want to replace that with something else we need an alliance of forces that say we don’t want that system, we want something else.
3. Who are the most significant Marxist thinkers of the last decades, in your opinion? What is the significance of their contributions in the development of Marxism?
I hate these questions about who are most significant Marxist thinkers. It depends what it is that you are thinking or worried about. For instance, over the last 30 years, there has been a very progressive attempt to incorporate environmental issues into the Marxian frame and this has been a very significant collective effort. I could list dozens of people…
If you are interested in how well is the environmental issue is now integrated into Marxist theory, you would look at a whole set of pioneering books that came out in 1970s and 1980s. People like Ted Benton have written extensively on it, and there is now John Bellamy Foster who is now a senior editorial figure in Monthly Review, which is taking the environmental question very seriously. Going back into Marxist texts, a colleague of mine, Neil Smith, wrote a book on Uneven Development, which is also very good on the production of nature thesis/argument. Of course, there is a lot of controversy in those fields. I’ve been in conflict with John Bellamy Foster because I don’t like the catastrophic/apocalyptic language that the environment will die and everything will disappear.
My particular area is another field of enquiry. I’m interested in how to better integrate spatial arguments and the geographical dimension into Marxist theory. This rests upon someone like Henri Lefebvre and his «Production of Space» . If you are interested in the urban DNA of the spatial dimension then the early work of Manuel Castells was also very significant. So there is a whole tradition there. Also, some good work has been done at a macro economic level of how the economy works. Books that have been very important to me in last few years would be Peter Gowan' book «Global Gamble» and Robert Brenner’s book «The Boom and The Bubble». More recently, Andrew Glyn has also published a book on the history of capitalist dynamics that has been very helpful. I also think that Samir Amin is a very important thinker particularly from the perspective of the developing world; I find him very perceptive particularly given his roots in Africa. I think there are more cultural/political analyses. I think a journal that is very important to read and maintains a high quality is «Socialist Register». It comes out once a year and each year has a particular theme. It is edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys. Leo Panitch does some very good work on finance and imperialism; how we understand finance/capital is now a crucial question and Leo has made major contributions in that field.
On the cultural/general political side, people like Perry Perry Anderson and Frederick Jameson have maintained a high level of cultural critique although sometimes I find it very hard to understand what they are saying. Some Western thinkers like Michael Lowy are also very important. The French continue to have a very good group around Jacques Bidet which is more philosophical in its approach.
Then there are groups like the autonomistas around Antonio Negri. I don’t particularly like that myself, but you can see an overlap between that kind of Marxism and the anarchist tradition which has been very strong in Latin America. For example, the autonomista line became very powerful in Argentina after the collapse. With the factory take-overs and the rise of neighborhood organizations, the autonomista philosophy became crucial. The Zapatista movement in Mexico also had a big impact on certain segments of the left, as people started about different paths towards political organisation. In Germany, there is also some fascination with the anarchist/autonominista line, which is anti-capitalist but can also be against organised labour very easily to the point of anti-Marxism. So this is also a complex area which I would add to Marxism’s theoretical problems: how does Marxism negotiate with anarchism? Is there a possibility of any kind of dialogue? And if so, between whom and about what?
I think this is something that should be opened up right now, because we have had 130 years of hostilities across the Marxist/anarchist divide. It seems to me that some of it is not justified, but some of it is. An evaluation of that issue is very important. For me personally, it is interesting that the radical tradition in geography was founded by anarchists. As you may know, Kropotkin was a geographer; the Royal Geographical Society in London even mobilised petitions to get him out of jail as he was such a good scientist. The French geographer Elisee Reclus was also an anarchist and a close friend of Kropotkin. If you like, the whole tradition of radicalism in geography is anarchist for a very simple reason: anarchists tend to be very sympathetic to questions of local difference, to environmental issues, and to spatial-cultural questions in ways that Marxism has sometimes not been very good at. For me as a geographer, it has been important to make Marxism more sensitive to these questions of geographical and cultural difference, and spatial structures and environmental issues. In a way, I am taking familiar anarchist fields, and trying to develop them more systematically inside of Marxist theory. So I think that dialogue with anarchism is close a lot of the time in terms of what I do…
4. How would you describe your relationship to the problem of dialectics in Marxism?
I think I am a dialectical thinker. Maybe people think I am not, but I don’t see how anyone can work with Marxist theory without being dialectical and understanding very clearly what the dialectical theory is about. When I teach Marx’s Capital, I also say “Look, Marx never wrote a text on what it means to be dialectical, so you have to learn what dialectics is from a very close reading of this text. See how he does it, and you learn from how he does it and after a while you start to analyse things in the same way.” I think it is a very insightful method, and to me it is central to what Marxism is about.
Now there are groups of Marxists like the analytical Marxists who do not believe in dialectics at all and think it is rubbish. And then there are those that try to reduce Marx to positivism. I don’t agree with any of that. You have to retain the dialectical method because it is foundational. But in order to learn what it is, you have to learn by doing. (I have written an essay about this just to help people; I’m not so sure it was successful, and I probably shouldn’t have done it, but certainly for me, the dialectic is crucial to how Marx thought.) There is, of course, much controversy over Marx’s dialectical method is. I certainly don’t see it as Hegelian and I think Althusser was right when he said that Marx did not merely invert the Hegelian dialectic, he revolutionised it.
5. In the 1990s, there was a widespread opinion that the contradiction between labor and capital was no longer the principal conflict of contemporary societies. Is this something you would agree with?
I don’t agree with that. It largely came about because of deindustrialisation in much of the advanced capitalist world, so that many people in Britain or the US would complain that the proletariat has disappeared. My answer is that it has not disappeared it has just gone somewhere else; it is now in China, Mexico or India. It has just disappeared from your own backyard. Nevertheless, this has been a very tangible problem. For instance, I arrived in city of Baltimore in 1969, at that time was a large steelworks there which employed over 25,000; the steel workers union was very powerful in the labour organisation of the city, which, in turn, had a strong tradition of organized labor. By the time I left the city in 2000, Bethlehem Steel employed only 2,000 people, though it was still producing almost the same amount of steel. In 1970, when we wanted to do something politically, we would go and talk to the steel workers and if we got them on our side, we could do all kinds of things. Now the steel workers union is irrelevant, and the labour unions in the city have almost disappeared because all the jobs are gone. So that then does raise some questions of which political base progressive politics can rely upon. We went through this transition where the political base shifted from the trade unions to the churches. To be more precise, inner city churches, particularly the African-American churches, became the centres of political activism over things like poverty and so on. But the problem is that this emphasized a number of particular views including the importance of the family and religion and those sort of things, so the actual basis of politics has shifted noticeably.
Then again, my city of Baltimore was the first to launch the Living Wage campaign. The argument was that the city should mandate a wage that would be much higher than the federal living wage, that it should be a wage that a family could live on. A big campaign was launched to get legislation passed and eventually Baltimore became the first state with a living wage ordinance that says that anyone who worked for the state had to receive a living wage. We then took it to private institutions like my own university, which has a big hospital and is the largest private employer in the state. So now the state is a living wage state. This is a progressive politics, but it is not the same as that which could be based on strong union power. Part of the living wage was about trying to organise temporary workers, and particularly cleaning and janitorial facilities. This is very difficult. It was nothing like waiting at the gates of a factory and saying “join the union” when people come out. You need a completely different strategy to organize. In the 1980s and 1990s, in many parts of the advanced capitalist world, there was a radical shift in the forms of political organization when the political base of the unions was lost…
6. Which points of connection between Marxist theory and mass labor movements do you see today?
For me, it lies in the whole question of the geography of the proletariat and the uneven geographical development of political movements. I think one of the key issues that has arisen during the neoliberal period from the 1970s onward is that uneven geographical development is actually used as a vehicle for the concentration of capitalist power, but it is also used as a vehicle for the disciplining of labor movements globally. Again, the labour movement has not been adapting strongly to this. Still, recently, some of the major labor union structures in Europe, the US and Latin America set up an alliance. Those are the kind of things that really need to be done, just as the First International took surplus funds from London and lent them to strikers in Lille or St Etienne. We need a global labour fund to support workers when they strike in various parts of the world.
So, we have to learn to wage class struggle on a global scale, but we do not have the institutional forms that allow us to do that very well right now. Most of the labor organizing is still very much at the nation state level. Moreover, it often held captive by a nationalism hostile to foreign workers and immigration. It does not want to have an internationalist perspective. Again, this is an area where a lot of work needs to be done. In 1970, labour was highly empowered relative to capital in the advanced capitalist countries and it has been disempowered since. In a sense, the capitalists have solved the labour problem for themselves. Partly by this geographical strategy and partly by the political strategy of having Margaret Thatcher smash the British union movement and having Ronald Reagan destroy even the mild strength of the American labour movement. In Russia, the coal miners were quite strong in the early 1990s and then they were essentially pretty much destroyed as a political force.
But again, this defeat does not mean that the capital-labour relationship has become irrelevant; it is always central. But in terms of politics, geography, and even ideology, the situation is today is critical.
The labour movement now needs to think about alliances. On the one hand, this would involve alliances across territorial boundaries, but it also entails alliances with many of the other political forces battling against neo-imperial liberalism. But here too there is an interesting geographical angle. Labour is very good at organising in place and if you get empowered in a particular place, for example France or somewhere like that, you obviously want to protect that power. So there is always this tendency towards the fragmentation of the labour movement around groups that have managed to acquire some privileges and some power in relation to the situation and those that do not. So there is an uneven geographical development of the labour struggle as well as labour conditions. How we put that together again seems to me to be a theoretical problem as well as a practical or political problem.
7. How can Marxist philosophy exist in the bourgeois university? Could you tell us about your experience in this regard? How can a bourgeois state agree to the presence of Marxism in the kind of "ideological state apparatus" (Althusser) as is the university?
Well, it has a very hard time and demands an intense struggle. It is a struggle to keep spaces open in a bourgeois university where critical theory or Marxist theory can flourish. You have certain weapons which exist in academia. For instance I always tell my students when they start out that I hope they are going to be as political as anything and hope that they are going to do a lot of good political things. But at the same time, I think it absolutely essential that they be very good academics. There is no way they are going to get a job unless they are very good. In fact, they have to better academics than almost anybody else in order to get a job.
So I fight to try get people to become really good academics, but the problem with that is that entails certain compromises in what you do and how you do it. I find this is in my own career. It’s very funny actually, in training students I often have very radical students who accuse me of being a bourgeois cop-out. This is very good because sometimes you compromise too much. Having students telling you is good for you. But then what is very interesting is when they become academics they do, I say who’s a bourgeois cop out now (laughs). I have some students who used to accuse me of being a bourgeois cop-out relative to whom now I am the one on the left and they have gone too far.
So it’s a struggle, it is a personal struggle because on the one hand you have to play the game on what academic excellence is about and how it is judged. On the other hand you have to try to keep the political outrage alive. Tenure is a valuable institution; once you get tenure, it is difficult for them to get rid of you. They can be very hostile to you and do all kinds of nasty things to you. That happened to me in Baltimore. The reason I left Baltimore was that the university was doing some very nasty things to me. They could not fire me, but they could make life unpleasant. So I moved to this place where they are delighted with what I do. So it is a struggle, but I think of it this way, if you were trying to form a union in a department store then you just don’t expect them to say yes, you have to fight for it. But I think that it was easier to fight for 20 years ago, it is harder to fight for now in part because some of the people who are very sympathetic to Marxism 20 years ago are now antagonistic. They say things like ‘we did all that, we know all that, it is all wrong, it does not work.’ So there are many ‘class traitors’ in academia right now, and that makes it very difficult.
My sense of it is that there is a younger generation of students right now who are much more interested in Marxism. This is almost like a grandparent theory of knowledge. I get on very well with some graduate students, I am like a granddaddy that says “Don’t listen to your parents’ generation, they got it all wrong,” meaning all the people who went post-modernist. I am having a good time right now talking to graduate students, but I am in a very privileged position in the sense that I am old enough so it does not matter, I don’t have to worry about my future career. I don’t have to worry about my reputation. I can get back to the outrage. But at the same time I also still have very much in mind that we need to do very good serious work, of good academic standing and of good academic quality, and that is the only way in which you are going to be able to survive, at least in the West. It may work out differently elsewhere, in France is used to be that there was a very strong patronage through the political parties, and political parties controlled certain departments, that does not happen in the English speaking world. We have to work in a different kind of way.
But then the other advantage is that sometimes your opposition is a bit stupid, they do not understand what you are doing. For instance I started teaching Marx’s Capital in the geography programme at Johns Hopkins University. The geography program was nothing; it was irrelevant; the title of the class was ‘Capital’ and apparently for about three or four years they thought it was a course about capital cities. The central administration only found out that this was about Marx’s Capital about four years later. So there are some tricks you can play. I like to tell this story to some of my colleagues who complain ‘oh you can’t do Marxism anymore’. I say once upon a time you considered yourself a very clever person who could figure out ways to do things in a subversive way, now you are expecting the administration to come to you and plead with you to teach Marx! Forget it! You have to find new ways to set things up, you have to play the fetishism game, you have to disguise what you are doing in something else and that can also help…
English version proof read and edited by David Riff
Thanks to Mik Sabiers for his assistance with this publication
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