[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: [Debate-List] David Harvey Interview on Class Struggle in Urban Spaces

Mon Sep 2 09:15:58 CEST 2013

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From: peter waterman <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 4:25 PM
Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: [Debate-List] David Harvey Interview on
Class Struggle in Urban Spaces
To: networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org,
CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES at jiscmail.ac.uk

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From: John Treat <john.treat at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 8:53 PM
Subject: [Debate-List] David Harvey Interview on Class Struggle in Urban
Spaces
To: DEBATE Debate <debate-list at fahamu.org>

Some interesting ideas here. I especially like Harvey's suggestion of an
international “league of socialist cities”.

There is a worthwhile, related lecture on "The Urbanisation of Class
Struggle" here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbqcxFS2P40. (Tech hint: If
you use a browser / add-on combo that allows you to download rather than
just stream Youtube videos, you can save huge amounts of bandwidth by
downloading the "mobile" version and then closing the window before the
full-res version loads, and watch the mobile version offline via VLC or
some other compatible video player. Picture quality isn't great, but for
video lectures that usually doesn't matter much.)

New David Harvey Interview on Class Struggle in Urban
Spaces<http://critical-theory.com/david-harvey-interview-class-struggle-urban-spaces/>

August 7th, 2013  |  by Eugene <http://critical-theory.com/author/admin/>.
Published in Theory and
Theorists<http://critical-theory.com/category/theory/> |  1
Comment<http://critical-theory.com/david-harvey-interview-class-struggle-urban-spaces/#comments>

The following is an interview published by the Occupied
Times<http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=11969>with Marxist geographer
David
Harvey <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Harvey>.

*Occupied Times:** ** In 1968, Henri Lefebvre first introduced the concept
of “the right to the city’’. He advocated the ‘rescue of man as the main
protagonist of the city he has built…the meeting point for collective
living.’ You have referred to this collective right – to remake ourselves
and our cities – as ‘one of the most precious yet most neglected of our
human rights.’ In what ways do you think we have neglected this human right
in recent years?*

*David Harvey:* If the question of what kind of city gets built depends
critically on what kind of people we want to be, then the broad failure to
openly discuss this relation means that we have abandoned the reshaping of
people and their passions to the requirements of capital accumulation. It
was, I think, very well understood by planners and policy makers that the
suburbanisation of the United States after 1945 would not only help rescue
the US from the prospect of a return to the depression conditions of the
1930s by way of a vast expansion of effective demand, but that it would
also serve to create a social and political world devoid of revolutionary
consciousness or anti-capitalist sentiment. Small wonder that the feminists
of the 1960s saw the suburb as their enemy and that the suburban lifestyle
became associated with a certain kind of political subjectivity that was
class-prejudiced, exclusionary and racist in the extreme.

*OT: **London is praised as a multicultural city, and perhaps a significant
component of the right to the city is the right to coexist. In re-imagining
and remaking cities, how can we ensure that a city remade isn’t done so in
a way that privileges or discriminates different interests or communities
that exist in the city?*

*DH:* There is nothing to ensure it other than social movements, active
political engagements and the willingness to fight for one’s place.
Conflict in and over the city is a healthy thing, not a pathology that
state interventions must control and put down.

*OT:** We live in a digital age. In many cases, people develop more
intimate relationships with people thousands of miles away than they do
with their neighbours on the same street. If cities have tended,
historically, to develop around shared physical space, how will
communicative technologies that undermine the preeminence of
physical/spatial communities, affect the future configuration of the city?*

*DH: *The new technologies are a double-edge sword. On the one hand they
can function as “weapons of mass distraction” and divert people to
believing politics is possible solely in some virtual world. Or, they can
be used to inspire and coordinate political action on the streets, in the
neighbourhoods and throughout the city. There is no substitute for bodies
on the street for political action as we have seen in Cairo, Istanbul,
Athens, Sao Paulo, etc. Working together with active street politics, the
new technologies can be a fabulous resource.

*OT:** Writing in ‘Whose Rebel City?’, Neil Grey suggests that in your most
recent book, ‘Rebel Cities’, your analysis neglected the autonomous Marxist
tradition first developed during in the urban struggles of 1960s and 1970s
Italy – characterised by the ‘Take over the City’ slogan; feminist debates
around social reproduction; the idea of ‘the social factory’ and so called
‘territorial community activism’ – instead focusing your theory on the
absorption of capital and labour surpluses through urbanisation. How do you
respond to this criticism? Do you agree that these political practices can
serve as outlining models of how inhabitants might re-organise their cities?
*

*DH: *I find this criticism strange. To be sure chapter 2 is about the
creation of urbanisation through processes of capital accumulation, but
chapter 5 is devoted to class social movements in the cities. I could not
cover all such movements of course and so there are many, such as those
associated with the autonomista movement in Italy that are, I am sure,
certainly worthy of inclusion. But I did look at the way the houses of the
people earlier in the century in Italy complemented the factory council
movements and of course took a lot of inspiration from the El Alto story as
well as from the Paris Commune and other urban uprisings, while trying to
theorise in what ways these could all be understood in the framework of
class struggle. So, to say I was only concerned with the absorption of
surplus capital is pretty weird and suggests Neil Grey either did not get
to the end of the book or was dismissive of it because I did not deal with
his particular favourite urban social movement.

I wish, by the way, I had cited Gramsci’s comment on the importance of
supplementing the factory councils with ward committees: “The ward
committee should also seek to incorporate delegates from other categories
of workers living in the ward: waiters, cab drivers, tramway men,
railwaymen, road sweepers, private employees, clerks and others. The ward
committee should be an expression of the whole of the working class living
in the ward, an expression that is legitimate and authoritative, that can
enforce a spontaneously delegated discipline that is backed by powers and
can order the immediate and complete cessation of all work in the ward.”

*OT:** On the heels of rapid urbanisation and an ever-inflating property
bubble in China, you have spoken of a rising class struggle on the ground
that people living in the West just don’t hear about. If we were to look
more carefully at the situation in China, what could we learn?*

*DH: *There is a lot more now coming out on China and an increasing
recognition of the dangers of both urban asset bubbles of gargantuan
proportions (particularly in housing) and a chronic problem of
overproduction of urbanisation in response to the crash of export markets
in 2008. There is now a lot of nervousness about urban overaccumulation.
Theoretically, I understand what is happening but when it will come to a
halt I cannot say. And we know there is a lot of urban and industrial
unrest in China but it is very difficult to judge how much and of what
significance.

*OT:** You place the concept you have termed ‘accumulation by
dispossession’ at the heart of urbanisation under capitalism. Swathes of
London are currently being transformed under the guise of ‘regeneration’,
coupled with housing benefit cuts and the new so-called Bedroom Tax. One
example of many, would be the hundreds of residents from the Heygate Estate
in Elephant & Castle who have lost their homes so that property developers
can replace social housing with ‘affordable’ properties. Grassroots
campaigns have sprung up to resist these displacements, but they
continually face policy and legal constraints. What are your thoughts on
the importance and potential pitfalls of a unified movement across the
city, or even wider?*

*DH: *I think it vital to unify as far as possible struggles against
dispossession across the whole city. But to do so requires an accurate
picture of the forms of dispossession occurring and their roots. For
example, there is at this time a need to put together a picture of the
predatory practices of the property developers and their financial backers
on a citywide basis, and initiate a collective citywide struggle to curb
and control their practices. Recently, we have seen urban unrest in Brazil
that is about transport costs but also against (and this is remarkable
given we are talking about Brazil) the stadium-building for the World Cup
and the displacement and waste of public resources that is involved, so
citywide and cross-city struggles are not impossible. The danger, as
always, is that the struggles may fade as people get tired of the fight.
The only answer is to keep the struggles going and build organisations that
have the capacity to do that (the MST in Brazil is a good example of this
even though it is not a distinctively urban struggle).

*OT:** There is a distinct lack of commonly-owned space in London. Much of
the city is privately owned and caters to the panopticon of surveillance,
‘do not trespass’ signage, and a dearth of public space free from market
interference. Is it important to seek out and grow community spaces, to
allow those resisting the depredations of capitalism to find the space not
only to work, but to explore new avenues of creative interaction as well?*

*DH: *The question of liberating spaces controlled by the state and turning
them into a commons controlled by the people is, in my opinion, crucial.
The rolling back of privatisation of public spaces is also vital and I
would hope to see many more movements directed towards such ends.

*OT: **You have talked about the possibility of a “league of socialist
cities” as a powerful way of changing the order of the world. Can you
expand on what you mean, and how these could work?*

*DH: *It is a bit of a far-out idea at first sight but there is a lot of
benchmarking and best practice communication going on between cities and on
some issues, like gun control in the USA, there are cooperative links
between urban administrations that can have progressive results. I see no
reason why such practices cannot build further into organised urban
resistance to neoliberal practices. I think a coordinated response across
urban administration in the UK to the so-called bedroom tax would be a
possibility that would echo the way the struggle over the poll tax unfolded
earlier. We have in fact done things of this sort but we don’t analyse them
fully afterwards and appreciate their possibilities.

*OT:** Civil unrest is becoming a more recurrent feature of urban life in
London, as it is for cities around the world, among them Athens, Madrid,
Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Bogotá, Rio de Janeiro and, most
recently, Stockholm. Are riots (not just protests and organised social
movements) now part of a toolkit to reclaim the right to the city? What can
those here in the financial capital of the world learn from these struggles
in other cities?*

*DH: *Since inviting me to comment on these questions we have Istanbul.
When you look at the global situation you sense there is a volcanic
situation bubbling beneath the surface of society and you never know when
and where it is going to explode next (who would have thought Istanbul,
even though it was plain to me on my earlier visit there that there were a
lot of discontents). I think we need to prepare ourselves for such
eruptions and build as far as we can, infrastructures and organisational
forms capable of supporting and developing them into sustainable movements.

*OT:** Whilst acknowledging the ingrained legitimisation of private
property within the concept, what are your views on the efficacy of
implementing a land value tax in the UK? Do you think it could achieve any
of the equalising effects its proponents advocate?*

*DH: *I think a land value tax could help but it does not, in the end,
address the problem of the vast extractions of wealth by a rentier class
that has become so very powerful in recent years particularly in major
cities like London and New York, for this is a major form of dispossession
that needs to be confronted.

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