---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Daniel Chavez <[email protected]> Date: Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 5:25 PM Subject: [Networkedlabour] David Harvey last night in Amsterdam, on use value, the state, and the 'fetishisation of the organisational form' To: [email protected] My favourite passages of David Harvey’s lecture, last night at De Balie, on the nature and role of the state (including the possibility of a ‘non-capitalist state’) and the plurality of organisational forms: "If you have a choice between a exchange value structure that allows wealth to be sucked out of the masses of the population in return for providing minimum use value, affordable housing, for example, I think you would prefer a system that provides affordable housing for everybody. And that leads us to the question about the role of the state; will the state be the mechanism that secures the primacy of use value over exchange value? Marx was a bit ambiguous about that. His initial response was “well, it should be associated labour, workers getting together and deciding their own system of production under workers’ control…”, as the beginning point for the transition. But then Marx also recognised that in order to build large infrastructures, such as the transport network or the sewage or water supply systems, it would not be enough to have associated labourers getting together and saying “Ok, we are going to build that”. The same idea applies to the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, an airport, or any other large project. Therefore, we need some kind of apparatus that has the capacity to provide large infrastructure. And I think it is very difficult to imagine an apparatus that doesn’t look something like the state." "I would like, however, also to point out that there’s a tendency in part of the left to marginalise the role of the state. And one thesis I put forward here is that there isn’t such thing as a non-contradictory answer to a contradiction, and that the state itself is full of contradictions. And we can see today how the contradictory aspect of the state is very clear in the expanding power of the oligarchy and the capitalist classes, and the ways they use the state for their own benefit. But there is no reason to think that some form of non-capitalist state couldn’t be designed and implemented." "Although I’m very sympathetic to the decentralised or assembly type of politics, it can only go so far. When you address certain questions referred to the scale of operations, assembly structures don’t really work. I quite like some anarchist proposals, like those developed by Murray Bookchin; I find their ideas very democratic and they suggest good scenarios to imagine how a socialist society might work, but thy are problematic when one tries to move to another scale of what has to be done. For instance, there is a myth about the problem of global warming and how it could be solved by decentralised communities. Actually, be careful what you wish for, because that might make things much worse. So, I think we have to imagine different layers of organisation and action, and for me that is quite obvious." "I also always get a little impatient with those groups in the left that fall in what I'd call the ‘fetishisation of the organisational form’, meaning that they assume that there is only one form of associational form that we can admit and if that is not ‘horizontal’ then we shouldn’t have anything to do with it." _______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/