[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] David Harvey last night in Amsterdam, on use value, the state, and the 'fetishisation of the organisational form'

Fri Oct 10 18:28:06 CEST 2014

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Daniel Chavez <chavez at tni.org>
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: networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org

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."

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