<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Orsan Senalp</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:orsan1234@gmail.com">orsan1234@gmail.com</a>></span><br>Date: Sun, Dec 20, 2015 at 1:55 PM<br>Subject: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: [Debate-List] (Fwd) David Harvey on capitalism, labour, consumption, organising and limits to anarchism<br>To: "<<a href="mailto:networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org">networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org</a>>" <<a href="mailto:networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org">networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org</a>><br><br><br><div dir="auto"><div>Begin forwarded message:</div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><b>From:</b> Patrick Bond <<a href="mailto:pbond@mail.ngo.za" target="_blank">pbond@mail.ngo.za</a>><br><b>Date:</b> 20 Dec 2015 07:19:24 GMT+1<br><b>To:</b> DEBATE <<a href="mailto:debate-list@fahamu.org" target="_blank">debate-list@fahamu.org</a>>, <a href="mailto:progeconnetwork@googlegroups.com" target="_blank">progeconnetwork@googlegroups.com</a>, "<a href="mailto:scorai@listserver.njit.edu" target="_blank">scorai@listserver.njit.edu</a>" <<a href="mailto:scorai@listserver.njit.edu" target="_blank">scorai@listserver.njit.edu</a>><br><b>Subject:</b> <b>[Debate-List] (Fwd) David Harvey on capitalism, labour, consumption, organising and limits to anarchism</b><br><b>Reply-To:</b> <a href="mailto:pbond@mail.ngo.za" target="_blank">pbond@mail.ngo.za</a><br><br></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div>
<big><big><b>Consolidating Power </b></big></big><br>
<br>
David Harvey<br>
December 9, 2015<br>
Roar Magazine<br>
<br>
<a href="https://roarmag.org/magazine/david-harvey-consolidating-power/" target="_blank">https://roarmag.org/magazine/david-harvey-consolidating-power/</a><br>
<br>
David Harvey, one of the leading Marxist thinkers of our times, sits
down with the activist collective AK Malabocas to discuss the
transformations in the mode of capital accumulation, the centrality
of the urban terrain in contemporary class struggles, and the
implications of all this for anti-capitalist organizing.<br>
<br>
<br>
<b><br>
</b><b>AK Malabocas: In the last forty years, the mode of capital
accumulation has changed globally. What do these changes mean for
the struggle against capitalism?</b><br>
<br>
David Harvey: From a macro-perspective, any mode of production tends
to generate a very distinctive kind of opposition, which is a
curious mirrored image of itself. If you look back to the 1960s or
1970s, when capital was organized in big corporatist, hierarchical
forms, you had oppositional structures that were corporatist,
unionist kinds of political apparatuses. In other words, a Fordist
system generated a Fordist kind of opposition.<br>
<br>
With the breakdown of this form of industrial organization,
particularly in the advanced capitalist countries, you ended up with
a much more decentralized configuration of capital: more fluid over
space and time than previously thought. At the same time we saw the
emergence of an opposition that is about networking and
decentralization and that doesn’t like hierarchy and the previous
Fordist forms of opposition.<br>
<br>
So, in a funny sort of way, the leftists reorganize themselves in
the same way capital accumulation is reorganized. If we understand
that the left is a mirror image of what we are criticizing, then
maybe what we should do is to break the mirror and get out of this
symbiotic relationship with what we are criticizing.<br>
<br>
<b>In the Fordist era, the factory was the main site of resistance.
Where can we find it now that capital has moved away from the
factory floor towards the urban terrain?</b><b><br>
</b><br>
First of all, the factory-form has not disappeared—you still find
factories in Bangladesh or in China. What is interesting is how the
mode of production in the core cities changed. For example, the
logistics sector has undergone a huge expansion: UPS, DHL and all of
these delivery workers are producing enormous values nowadays.<br>
<br>
Why would we say that producing cars is more important than
producing hamburgers? Unfortunately the left is not comfortable with
the idea of organizing fast-food workers.<br>
<br>
In the last decades, a huge shift has occurred in the service sector
as well: the biggest employers of labor in the 1970s in the US were
General Motors, Ford and US Steel. The biggest employers of labor
today are McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Walmart. Back then,
the factory was the center of the working class, but today we find
the working class mainly in the service sector. And why would we say
that producing cars is more important than producing hamburgers?<br>
<br>
Unfortunately the left is not comfortable with the idea of
organizing fast-food workers. Its picture of the classical working
class doesn’t fit with value production of the service workers, the
delivery workers, the restaurant workers, the supermarket workers.<br>
<br>
The proletariat did not disappear, but there is a new proletariat
which has very different characteristics from the traditional one
the left used to identify as the vanguard of the working class. In
this sense, the McDonalds workers became the steel workers of the
twenty-first century.<br>
<br>
<b>If this is what the new proletariat is about, where are the
places to organize resistance now?</b><br>
<br>
It’s very difficult to organize in the workplaces. For example,
delivery drivers are moving all over the place. So this population
could maybe be better organized outside the working place, meaning
in their neighborhood structures.<br>
<br>
There is already an interesting phrase in Gramsci’s work from <a href="tel:1919" value="+661919" target="_blank">1919</a>
saying that organizing in the workplace and having workplace
councils is all well, but we should have neighborhood councils, too.
And the neighborhood councils, he said, have a better understanding
of what the conditions of the whole working class are compared to
the sectoral understanding of workplace organizing.<br>
<br>
Workplace organizers used to know very well what a steelworker was,
but they didn’t understand what the proletariat was about as a
whole. The neighborhood organization would then include for example
the street cleaners, the house workers, the delivery drivers.
Gramsci never really took this up and said: ‘come on, the Communist
Party should organize neighborhood assemblies!’<br>
<br>
Nevertheless, there are a few exceptions in the European context
where Communist Parties did in fact organize neighborhood
councils—because they couldn’t organize in the workplace, like in
Spain for example. In the 1960s this was a very powerful form of
organizing. Therefore—as I have argued for a very long time—we
should look at the organization of neighborhoods as a form of class
organization. Gramsci only mentioned it once in his writings and he
never pursued it further.<br>
<br>
We should look at the organization of neighborhoods as a form of
class organization.<br>
<br>
In Britain in the 1980s, there were forms of organizing labor in
city-wide platforms on the basis of trades councils, which were
doing what Gramsci suggested. But within the union movement these
trades councils were always regarded as inferior forms of organizing
labor. They were never treated as being foundational to how the
union movement should operate.<br>
<br>
In fact, it turned out that the trades councils were often much more
radical than the conventional trade unions and that was because they
were rooted in the conditions of the whole working class, not only
the often privileged sectors of the working-class. So, to the extent
that they had a much broader definition of the working class, the
trades councils tended to have much more radical politics. But this
was never valorized by the trade union movement in general—it was
always regarded as a space where the radicals could play.<br>
<br>
The advantages of this form of organizing are obvious: it overcomes
the split between sectoral organizing, it includes all kinds of
“deterritorialized” labor, and it is very suitable to new forms of
community and assembly-based organization, as Murray Bookchin was
advocating, for example.<br>
<br>
<b>In the recent waves of protest—in Spain and Greece, for instance,
or in the Occupy movement—you can find this idea of “localizing
resistance.” It seems that these movements tend to organize around
issues of everyday life, rather than the big ideological questions
that the traditional left used to focus on.</b><br>
<br>
Why would you say that organizing around everyday life is not one of
the big questions? I think it is one of the big questions. More than
half of the world’s population lives in cities, and everyday life in
cities is what people are exposed to and have their difficulties in.
These difficulties reside as much in the sphere of the realization
of value as in the sphere of the production of value.<br>
<br>
This is one of my very important theoretical arguments: everybody
reads Volume I of Capital and nobody reads Volume II. Volume I is
about the production of value, Volume II is about the realization of
value. Focusing on Volume II, you clearly see that the conditions of
realization are just as important as the conditions of production.<br>
<br>
Class struggles over realization—over affordable housing, for
example—are just as significant for the working class as struggles
of wages and work conditions. What is the point of having a higher
wage if it is immediately taken back in terms of higher housing
costs?<br>
<br>
Marx often talks about the necessity of seeing capital as the
contradictory unity between production and realization. Where value
is produced and where it is realized are two different things. For
example, a lot of value is produced in China and is actually
realized by Apple or by Walmart in the United States. And, of
course, the realization of value is about the realization of value
by means of expensive working-class consumption.<br>
<br>
Capital might concede higher wages at the point of production, but
then it recuperates it at the point of realization by the fact that
working people have to pay much higher rents and housing costs,
telephone costs, credit card costs and so on. So class struggles
over realization—over affordable housing, for example—are just as
significant for the working class as struggles of wages and work
conditions. What is the point of having a higher wage if it is
immediately taken back in terms of higher housing costs?<br>
<br>
In their relationship to the working class, capitalists long ago
learned that they can make a lot of money out of taking back what
they have given away. And, to the degree that—particularly in the
1960s and 1970s—workers became increasingly empowered in the sphere
of consumption, capital starts to concentrate much more on pulling
back value through consumption.<br>
<br>
So the struggles in the sphere of realization, which where not that
strong in Marx’s times, and the fact that nobody reads the damn book
(Volume II), is a problem for the conventional left. When you say to
me: ‘what is the macro-problem here?’—well, this is a macro-problem!
The conception of capital and the relation between production and
realization. If you don’t see the contradictory unity between both
then you will not get the whole picture. Class struggle is written
all over it and I can’t understand why a lot of Marxists can’t get
their head around how important this is.<br>
<br>
The problem is how we understand Marx in 2015. In Marx’s times, the
extent of urbanization was relatively convenient and the consumerism
of the working class was almost non-existent, so all Marx had to
talk about was that the working class manages to survive on a meager
wage and that they are very sophisticated in doing that. Capital
left them to their own devices to do what they like.<br>
<br>
But nowadays we are in a world where consumerism is responsible for
about 30 percent of the dynamic of the global economy—in the US it’s
even 70 percent. So why are we sitting here and saying consumerism
is kind of irrelevant, sticking to Volume I and talking about
production and not about consumerism?<br>
<br>
What urbanization does is to force us into certain kinds of
consumerism, for example: you have to have an automobile. So your
lifestyle is dictated in lots of ways by the form urbanization
takes. And again, in Marx’s days this wasn’t significant, but in our
days this is crucial. We have to get around with forms of organizing
that actually recognize this change in the dynamic of class
struggle.<br>
<br>
<b>Given this shift, the left would definitely have to adjust its
tactics and forms of organizing, as well as its conception of what
to organize for.</b><br>
<br>
The groups that stamped the recent movements with their character,
coming from the anarchist and autonomist traditions, are much more
embedded in the politics of everyday life, much more than the
traditional Marxists.<br>
<br>
I am very sympathetic to the anarchists, they have a much better
line on this, precisely in dealing with the politics of consumption
and their critique of what consumerism is about. Part of their
objective is to change and reorganize everyday life around new and
different principles. So I think this is a crucial point to which a
lot of political action has to be directed these days. But I
disagree with you in saying that this is no “big question.”<br>
<br>
<b>So, looking at examples from southern Europe—solidarity networks
in Greece, self-organization in Spain or Turkey—these seem to be
very crucial for building social movements around everyday life
and basic needs these days. Do you see this as a promising
approach?</b><br>
<br>
I think it is very promising, but there is a clear self-limitation
in it, which is a problem for me. The self-limitation is the
reluctance to take power at some point. Bookchin, in his last book,
says that the problem with the anarchists is their denial of the
significance of power and their inability to take it. Bookchin
doesn’t go this far, but I think it is the refusal to see the state
as a possible partner to radical transformation.<br>
<br>
There is a tendency to regard the state as being the enemy, the 100
percent enemy. And there are plenty of examples of repressive states
out of public control where this is the case. No question: the
capitalist state has to be fought, but without dominating state
power and without taking it on you quickly get into the story of
what happened for example in <a href="tel:1936" value="+661936" target="_blank">1936</a> and <a href="tel:1937" value="+661937" target="_blank">1937</a> in Barcelona and then all
over Spain. By refusing to take the state at a moment where they had
the power to do it, the revolutionaries in Spain allowed the state
to fall back into the hands of the bourgeoisie and the Stalinist
wing of the Communist movement—and the state got reorganized and
smashed the resistance.<br>
<br>
<b>That might be true for the Spanish state in the 1930s, but if we
look at the contemporary neoliberal state and the retreat of the
welfare state, what is left of the state to be conquered, to be
seized?</b><br>
<br>
To begin with, the left is not very good at answering the question
of how we build massive infrastructures. How will the left build the
Brooklyn bridge, for example? Any society relies on big
infrastructures, infrastructures for a whole city—like the water
supply, electricity and so on. I think that there is a big
reluctance among the left to recognize that therefore we need some
different forms of organization.<br>
<br>
The left is not very good at answering the question of how we build
massive infrastructures, for which we need some different forms of
organization.<br>
<br>
There are wings of the state apparatus, even of the neoliberal state
apparatus, which are therefore terribly important—the center of
disease control, for example. How do we respond to global epidemics
such as Ebola and the like? You can’t do it in the anarchist way of
DIY-organization. There are many instances where you need some
state-like forms of infrastructure. We can’t confront the problem of
global warming through decentralized forms of confrontations and
activities alone.<br>
<br>
One example that is often mentioned, despite its many problems, is
the Montreal Protocol to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbon in
refrigerators to limit the depletion of the ozone layer. It was
successfully enforced in the 1990s but it needed some kind of
organization that is very different to the one coming out of
assembly-based politics.<br>
<br>
<b>From an anarchist perspective, I would say that it is possible to
replace even supra-national institutions like the WHO with
confederal organizations which are built from the bottom up and
which eventually arrive at worldwide decision-making.</b><br>
<br>
Maybe to a certain degree, but we have to be aware that there will
always be some kind of hierarchies and we will always face problems
like accountability or the right of recourse. There will be
complicated relationships between, for example, people dealing with
the problem of global warming from the standpoint of the world as a
whole and from the standpoint of a group that is on the ground,
let’s say in Hanover or somewhere, and that wonders: ‘why should we
listen to what they are saying?’<br>
<b><br>
</b><b>So you believe this would require some form of authority?</b><br>
<br>
No, there will be authority structures anyway—there will always be.
I have never been in an anarchist meeting where there was no secret
authority structure. There is always this fantasy of everything
being horizontal, but I sit there and watch and think: ‘oh god,
there is a whole hierarchical structure in here—but it’s covert.’<br>
<br>
<b>Coming back to the recent protests around the Mediterranean: many
movements have focused on local struggles. What is the next step
to take towards social transformation?</b><br>
<br>
At some point we have to create organizations which are able to
assemble and enforce social change on a broader scale. For example,
will Podemos in Spain be able to do that? In a chaotic situation
like the economic crisis of the last years, it is important for the
left to act. If the left doesn’t make it, then the right-wing is the
next option. I think—and I hate to say this—but I think the left has
to be more pragmatic in relation to the dynamics going on right now.<br>
<br>
<b>More pragmatic in what sense?</b><br>
<br>
Well, why did I support SYRIZA even though it is not a revolutionary
party? Because it opened a space in which something different could
happen and therefore it was a progressive move for me.<br>
<br>
It is a bit like Marx saying: the first step to freedom is the
limitation of the length of the working day. Very narrow demands
open up space for much more revolutionary outcomes, and even when
there isn’t any possibility for any revolutionary outcomes, we have
to look for compromise solutions which nevertheless roll back the
neoliberal austerity nonsense and open the space where new forms of
organizing can take place.<br>
<br>
Narrow demands open up space for more revolutionary outcomes.<br>
<br>
For example, it would be interesting if Podemos looked towards
organizing forms of democratic confederalism—because in some ways
Podemos originated with lots of assembly-type meetings taking place
all over Spain, so they are very experienced with the assembly
structure.<br>
<br>
The question is how they connect the assembly-form to some permanent
forms of organization concerning their upcoming position as a strong
party in Parliament. This also goes back to the question of
consolidating power: you have to find ways to do so, because without
it the bourgeoisie and corporate capitalism are going to find ways
to reassert it and take the power back.<br>
<br>
<b>What do you think about the dilemma of solidarity networks
filling the void after the retreat of the welfare state and
indirectly becoming a partner of neoliberalism in this way?</b><br>
<br>
There are two ways of organizing. One is a vast growth of the NGO
sector, but a lot of that is externally funded, not grassroots, and
doesn’t tackle the question of the big donors who set the
agenda—which won’t be a radical agenda. Here we touch upon the
privatization of the welfare state.<br>
<br>
This seems to me to be very different politically from grassroots
organizations where people are on their own, saying: ‘OK, the state
doesn’t take care of anything, so we are going to have to take care
of it by ourselves.’ That seems to me to be leading to forms of
grassroots organization with a very different political status.<br>
<b><br>
</b><b>But how to avoid filling that gap by helping, for example,
unemployed people not to get squeezed out by neoliberal state?</b><br>
<br>
Well there has to be an anti-capitalist agenda, so that when the
group works with people everybody knows that it is not only about
helping them to cope but that there is an organized intent to
politically change the system in its entirety. This means having a
very clear political project, which is problematic with
decentralized, non-homogenous types of movements where somebody
works one way, others work differently and there is no collective or
common project.<br>
<br>
This connects to the very first question you raised: there is no
coordination of what the political objectives are. And the danger is
that you just help people cope and there will be no politics coming
out of it. For example, Occupy Sandy helped people get back to their
houses and they did terrific work, but in the end they did what the
Red Cross and federal emergency services should have done.<br>
<b><br>
</b><b>The end of history seems to have passed already. Looking at
the actual conditions and concrete examples of anti-capitalist
struggle, do you think “winning” is still an option?</b><br>
<br>
Definitely, and moreover, you have occupied factories in Greece,
solidarity economies across production chains being forged, radical
democratic institutions in Spain and many beautiful things happening
in many other places. There is a healthy growth of recognition that
we need to be much broader concerning politics among all these
initiatives.<br>
<br>
The Marxist left tends to be a little bit dismissive of some of this
stuff and I think they are wrong. But at the same time I don’t think
that any of this is big enough on its own to actually deal with the
fundamental structures of power that need to be challenged. Here we
talk about nothing less than a state. So the left will have to
rethink its theoretical and tactical apparatus.<br>
<br>
<br>
David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and
Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
(CUNY). His most recent book is Seventeen Contradictions and the End
of Capitalism (Profile, 2014).<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
<br>
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