I just watched a recent talk that David Harvey gave at the Subversive Film Festival in Croatia on the 19th May 2011. He was one of many speakers at the event, though I haven't listened to the other speakers yet. His talk was entitled "Emancipation from What and from Whom?" In the course of this lecture, Harvey talked about the urban roots of the current financial crisis and of many other crises throughout the 20th century, the rise of the neo-liberal project, issues of urbanisation, and finally the project which he thinks the Left today should engage in. As always, Harvey presents his ideas clearly and passionately, and it was a very worthwhile talk to listen to.
For those of you who are not familiar with his work, David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Geography and Anthropology at the Graduate Centre of The City University of New York (CUNY). He is a leading social theorist, and his work fuses his training in geography with his expert knowledge of Marxism. Combining the two, he has written extensively about the relationship between urbanisation and capitalism, the geographical flows of capital, and the way social justice relates to questions of lived space. Harvey has been credited with bringing back Marxist methods as useful tools for diagnosing and critiquing global capitalism, and particularly neo-liberalism.
In the lecture I just watched Harvey talks about most of these very issues. One of the most interesting things that Harvey talks about in the lecture, however, is what he considers to be the two main responses to the financial crisis we are currently in. On the one hand, he says, there is the response of countries like China. These countries pour enormous amounts of money into development projects (debt-financed of course, though China can draw on huge surpluses from foreign investment) in order to stimulate their economy. Whilst there are many important social and ethical issues involved in the case of China, nonetheless they have massively improved their unemployment levels (Harvey reports that unemployment has been cut from around 20 million in 2008 to around 3 million today).
On the other hand, countries like the U.S., the U.K., and Greece represent a different response to the crisis: namely, austerity measures. Harvey looks at this response as a (not-so) covert political project, that of cutting back on social institutions in order to let business gain more control (justified by the enormous debt and the notion that we cannot let the financial institutions fail). This can be seen as part of a trend over the last 30-40 years, that of the rise to power of neo-liberal economics. Harvey sees neo-liberalism as a class project: the aim of the neo-liberals and their supporters was and is to fight back against the labour struggles that have taken place more and more since the second World War. With the rise of the welfare state, and because of many forms of popular struggle and protest, capital has, in Harvey's terms, been made to bear the cost of what economists refer to as 'externalities'. If the main purpose of capital is to reproduce itself and grow, then anything which is a barrier to this will be (hopefully) externalised. For example, if a factory pollutes the environment then this is seen from the capitalist's point of view as an externality: it is someone else's problem. Their concern is with generating more surplus value.
Harvey identifies two main externalities: the environment and the reproduction of social life. The environment and the quality of daily life are seen as external issues from the point of view of capital. Therefore, the labour struggles and social movements that have taken place over the last 200 years have been a way of trying to force capital to bear those costs - to internalise them. But as Harvey points out, the 1970s saw a backlash from the capitalist class, especially under the guise of neo-liberalism. One of the responses was to move labour to a place where labour rights were not established and where social pressure would be minimal. Hence the rise of out-sourced labour or 'sweatshop' factories. Conversely, another response is not to move labour production abroad but to change the workforce. Immigrant labour, and especially illegal immigrant labour, has the advantage (for the capitalist) of severely lacking in labour rights. There can be no worker's union for illegal immigrant workers, and therefore no pressure can be put on capital to internalise the costs of the reproduction of daily life, let alone the harm caused to the environment.
The government can also play a role in helping the capitalist, as governments like the Reagan and Thatcher administrations did. Firstly, if you place a complete idiot at the head of a public institution then you can effectively force that institution to crumble and lose favour with the public by denouncing it as inefficient, incompetent and so on. Secondly, the government can de-fund institutions, thereby disempowering them without scrapping them. They still exist, but they have no money to do anything, or so little money they are not effective.
Harvey goes on to point out that Reagan created huge deficit problems in the U.S., largely through two ways: firstly, by cutting the top tax rate from 72 per cent to 32 per cent, and secondly by escalating the arms race with the Soviet Union (his administration poured large sums of money into the 'Star Wars' project of building laser weapons in space in order to shoot down enemy missiles - the project was a complete failure). Interestingly, Harvey continues, Reagan's budget director made a controversial statement during Reagan's second term as president. He stated that the aim all along was to run up the debt so drastically that they could go after all those annoying social institutions which put pressure on capital.
Fast-forward to Bush Jr.'s government and we see a similar problem: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost around a trillion dollars. Yet when anyone questioned Cheney, he would reply that everything is fine because Reagan taught us that debt isn't a problem. However, today's Republican party cites the debt as reason to put more austerity measures into practice. And this does not just apply to the U.S. In the U.K. David Cameron's coalition government is doing more or less the same thing: bail out the financial institutions, creating a sovereign debt crisis, and then reduce the living standard of the population in order to pay back some of that debt. Of course, as Harvey points out, people often make the argument that taxing the rich leads to societies of low growth. Yet, he argues that when you look at the figures this is simply not the case. The top tax rate in the U.S. was 92 per cent back in the 1950s, and was cut by Reagan from 72 per cent to 32 per cent in the 1980s as already stated. Over this period the U.S. enjoyed growth and expansion. Since Reagan the U.S. has been transformed from the biggest creditor to one of the biggest debtors. Since at least as far back as 2007, the U.S. was borrowing an average of around $3 billion per day!
Returning to Harvey's main point, what is important to focus on is that this whole issue of the financial crisis highlights the problems internal to capitalism. It is not a freak accident that there are crises in capitalist societies. As Harvey points out, particularly in his last book The Enigma of Capital, crises are a necessary part of how capitalism works. They highlight the internal contradictions of capitalism, and expose the harsh inequalities in society and around the globe. Those governments who use the debt as a way to justify austerity are almost undoubtedly taking advantage of the situation in order to give more power to the rich minority at the expense of the poor majority. It is for this reason that one can learn a lot from how crises arise and how they are responded to by governments.
As Harvey concludes, the hard task faced by the Left today is to find new ways and principles of organisation. Harvey's own response is to concentrate on the urban site of struggle. This means organising people in order to think about, discuss, and find ways of changing the city after our own heart's desire, and not after the developer's (Harvey often points out the way Manhattan is being transformed into an enclave for the super-rich. He also speaks frequently about the Right to the City movement which is trying to fight back). Harvey concentrates on the city largely because of his view that the city is one of the best places for both investment and development. As he has shown, both Haussmann in Second Empire Paris, and Robert Moses in post-WWII New York, demonstrated the potential of cities as ways of disposing of too much capital. Cities are the sites of huge investment and development, and they reveal on a large scale the social inequalities of society. Therefore, in remaking the city we can remake society and ourselves. The question is: who do we want to be? Depending on how the city is remade, we may remake ourselves for the better, or for the worse.
Harvey believes that with proper self-organising, the people can remake the city into a space that is more socially just. This means transforming the city from a space that developers appropriate and remake for the rich, into a space for all, a space democratically run and accountable. But this is not going to be easy, as he himself admits. The hope is there though: hope that we will come together to discuss and find ways of remaking the city in order to make society more just, more inclined towards helping the weak, the elderly and less able.
For those of you who haven't heard David Harvey speak, I recommend you to start here. This is a fantastic lecture, which covers many of the topics and themes prominent in his work, and which ends with a question and answer session in which Harvey talks about concrete struggles such as his own in Baltimore. Links are provided below. Thanks for reading!
David Harvey lecture Part 1:
Part 2:
