David Harvey at #OccupyLSX—“This is going to change politics in a very fundamental way”

Last Saturday, November the 12th,  David Harvey visited Occupy London Stock Exchange. The author—amongst others—of A Companion to Marx's Capital and Spaces of Global Capitalism described Occupy LSX as “a marvelous kind of site” and invited the protesters to “keep at it, keep at it, keep at it.” We publish below the full speech, transcribed by Elaine Castillo.



"This is, this is absolutely fabulous, this is fantastic. I mean, you know, this is great—I couldn’t imagine that London could get like this! And you’re doing a really, really great job. And this is really, I think, going to change things.

Because one of the things that I think we’re learning over the last few years actually and particularly over the last few months, is that it’s people—on the street, in the squares—that really matters, in the end. Because that’s the only political force we’ve got. They’ve got the money, they can buy politics, the can buy the media, they can buy anything they want. We don’t have that. The only thing we have is people. And a mass of people. And the more people mass on the street, the harder and harder it becomes for them to say, ‘Oh, no, your interests are not our interests.’

And the other thing that needs to be established here is that, you know, we live in a world where people talk about the importance of public space. But most of the time the public is not allowed to be in that public space. What you’re showing is: people belong in this public space. And when we get in this public space, we can turn it from a public space into a commons. Into a political space. Where we can start to discuss and understand, and start to militate against the incredible, incredible concentrations of wealth and power.

And we’ve been through something called a crisis, a crisis for whom? Actually, you look at the number of billionaires around the world, there are about 30% more billionaires now than there were three years ago. The crisis has been a way of assembling even more wealth in fewer and fewer hands. And the way in which it is done is to go after people who are the most vulnerable. That is, you extract wealth from those who can least afford to have that extraction visited on them.

And at the same time, this crisis is one where the real questions are never being addressed. And the three big questions indeed I think to be addressed are these: firstly, there’s the question of global poverty. And it’s not only global poverty but it’s global inequality. And it’s not only inequality of wealth and inequality of income, but it’s the inequality of political power. That in fact, that wealth, that income, is being used to buy politics. And this of course this is a bit of an old tradition, I mean, in the United States, Mark Twain said of the US Congress, he said: ‘The United States always has the best Congress that money can buy.’

And this is actually how politics has been evolving, over the last 30 years in particular. More and more money buys influence and buys political power. It also structures the media. Increasingly we find it dominates what’s going on inside of universities. It dominates our educational system, so that universities increasingly become places where all you learn is neoliberal ideology. Where all you learn is corporatist managerial techniques. And those corporatist managerial techniques are about actually how to squeeze more and more money out of those who can least afford it.

Now, one of the ways in which people like to take on the question of global poverty is this. They say, Well, okay, we should have more and more NGOs, we should set up, you know, things and try to help people in poverty by doing this and doing that, you know, dividing blankets here and a bit of medical care there. Which is not all bad. But the problem, I try to say to people who are into that, the one thing you don’t seem to understand, is that you cannot solve the problem of global poverty without going after the accumulation of global wealth. And until you all leave your anti-poverty campaigns and you actually join the anti-wealth campaigns, nothing’s going to happen.

I mean, I’m old enough to remember the anti-poverty rhetoric of the 1950s and I remember it in the 1960s, I remember it in the 1970s, and the 1980s—-and then we had the millenium goals, ‘We’re going to eliminate global poverty by 2015,’ and here we are, four years to go, and it’s much worse than it was. We hear it again and again and again. And the reason that happens is that the solution we are told that must be applied to solve global poverty is the very set of mechanisms that produce it. That is, free markets, free trade, free right on the part of capitalist class to exploit, to the hilt, everybody that they can get their hands on.

Furthermore, it’s not only about exploiting labor. What is now going on is that we are finding more and more that accumulation of wealth is through the dispossesion of others’ wealth. I mean, the capitalist class doesn’t even know how to produce wealth anymore. What they are very good at is stealing. They’re good at robbery. they’re good at actually legalizing the extraction of wealth by all sorts of means. ‘Eminent domain’, ‘move populations out of here…’ And right now, worldwide, there is what we call a ‘land grab’ going on. That is, an attempt to color all of the resources of planet earth so that, actually, a small group of people effectively control all of the resources which allow social life to flourish. We cannot let that concentration of wealth continue. It has to be stopped. It has to be reversed.

And how can it be reversed when we don’t have the money to buy politics, when we don’t have the money to buy the media, when we don’t have the money to dominate the television, when don’t have all the… how do we do it? Well, you’re showing ow you do it. You assemble in places like this. And you stay in places like this. You don’t say, We’re going to have a demonstration and then go home. No. You stay. You stay.

And the fact that you’re staying is, I think, the most, one of the most significant political events that’s actually happened, over the last ten, fifteen, even fifty years. And I think that is absolutely why this is such a fabulous situation that you’ve created. You’re taking a public space, you’re turning it into a commons, and you’re saying, ‘Our intersts have to be heard, our voices have to be heard.’ And at this particular point, it doesn’t really matter exactly what you’re saying, the most important thing is that you are here, and you’re goddamn staying here.

Now I suggested that one of the big problems in the world is global poverty, now that’s associated with something which I think is another aspect of our political situation. Capital works in such a way that it incurs certain costs in what it does. But what it also does is to try to shed those costs and make somebody else liable for them. And there are a whole bundle of costs which are associated with the reproduction of society. We talk about education, we talk about health care, we talk about basic human services, we talk about caring for the elderly, we talk about dealing with the problems that are created through alienation in terrible work environments, we talk about all of those issues. Well, the economists have a little word for this. They call it ‘externalities.’ And what’s meant by that is actually you take a cost which you should bear, but you get rid of it. You turn the cost into an externality that somebody has to pay for.

Well, since Thatcher, there’s been a systematic assault, to try to turn more of the costs of social reproduction into externalities. Costs that capital will not bear. ‘You bear the cost of your own education, you bear the cost of your own health care. and if you get sick and you die, that’s your own fault. It’s not capital’s fault.’

Now in the 1950s and 1960s, the state was forced by political circumstances to bear some of those costs and to tax capital, to bear some of those costs. But what Margaret Thatcher started to do was to say, ‘Look, we are actually not going to pay those costs anymore, they’re up to your wn personal responsibilties, it’s up to your own personal savings, it’s your own personal life and you have to take care of it, and if you don’t take care of it and get into trouble, that’s your problem.’

Now that was what Thatcher launched, and actually there’s a pattern that goes on here. Everybody thought when Thatcher was gone—-got rid of Major as well—-that things would change. No! We got Tony Blair. And what did Blair do, he deepened what was going on. Blair started to introduce the top-up fees at universities, Blair is the one who started to push this Thatcherite agenda even further. And right now what we’ve got is a situation where the Thatcherite agenda is with us even though she is long gone.

And this is a global problem. I mean, I was in Chile recently, fabulous situation in Chile, I hope you can establish links with then. The students there have occupied all of the public universities. And mind you, they’re not moving! They’re not going anywhere and they’ve been doing it for four or five months. Quite a few of the high schools ae actually occupied. And what they’re saying is this:

‘Pinochet privatized all of the educational system; when Pinochet went and we got social democracy, we got rid of the dictatorship, we imagined that things would change. They didn’t change; in fact, they’ve got worse. So what we have to do is to end that process that Pinochet started.’ This is what they’re saying.

And we have to end what Thatcher started, and reverse it entirely. In other words, what we have to have is a political program to end the whole Thatcher era because it has not ended at all, and what we see with the current conservatives right now is that they want to make it even more Thatcherite than Thatcher.

That this, if you like, what the political task is. To force capital to bear all of those costs that it doesn’t want to bear. It should take care of education. We should have a free decent education for everybody. And it should be an equal quality education; none of this nonsense about, If you go live in this suburb, you get decent education and if you live in the inner city, you get crap. No. We should actually equalize educational opportunity everywhere. And the same occurs with questions of health care. The same thing happens with all of the forms of social services; they have to be revolutionized.

They have to be actually transformed in such a way that they’re not run through some abstract bureaucracy but they’re run on a popular kind of basis. In other words, what we want is not simply the restablishment of some bureaucratic welfare state, what we want is the restoration of the right to decent health care, decent caring, and for that to actually be then rendered on a popular basis. It is, if you like, popular assemblies that should decide about hospital populations, it’s things of that sort that need to be dealt with in a much more democratic kind of way.

The other huge problem there is globally is the problem of environmental degradation. Again, capital does not want to bear those costs. It says basically, well, if islands go underwater because of global warming and sea levels rise, let other people bother with the costs. Not us. So again, it’s a matter of real costs which are visited upon people, all around the world—-indigenous populations in particualr are being very hard hurt by all of this. These costs have to be brought back and capital has to be forced to pay those costs. But they’re not going to do it voluntarily; they’re only going to do it if they’re forced to. And they’re going to be forced by political process, and they’re going to be forced by political oposition.

So those it seems to me are the two big global issues that we face, and it’s going to take a global movement to deal with them. And what we see is a global movement emerging. I mean, there have been elements of it that have been working for a long tme, you have things like, groups like the landless peasant group in Brazil; fantastic movement. You have the Chilean students who have been militating along these lines now for some for or five years. Let’s give a shout for the Chilean students…

We have a Maoist insurrection in Central India, which is portrayed as a very cruel and horrible kind of thing, but it turns out if you read Arundhati Roy, or something like that, these are people who are really struggling, just to say alive, in the circumstance where they’re constantly being attacked by the political power and the police power of the state apparatus. And the same would be true in countries like Bolivia, where you see indigenous populations mobilizing, and they’ve mobilized in very very strong kinds of ways. So all around the world there is a growing sense that the system which has been constructed does not and cannot work, and furthermore it must not be allowed to work any further.

And there is, to me anyway, one of the big final problems, which is that capital is always about growth. You see the newspapers, and what are they saying, they say, ‘Oh, there’s a crisis, we have no growth.’ And people only stop talking about criss when we get three percent growth minimum. Which means that this form of society we live in is actually given over to compound growth forever. Three percent compound growth forever. Now think of that for a moment. Three percent compound growth on all the resources that we consume. Three percent compound growth on all the money which we accumulate. When capital was about what was happening in Manchester and Birmingham, and that kind of thing in say 1820, three percent compound growth for a long time looked okay. I mean, there were all these areas of the world that hadn’t been conquered by capital yet, you know, Asia, China in particular, there were plenty of places to go.

So where does the three percent growth come from now? The whole world is saturated, saturated with consumer goods, saturated with that growth. And what has to happen is we have to start to think about the move towards about a zero growth economy. and as we think about that, we have to understand very clearly that that is a non-capitalist economy. That is a non-capitalist economy for a very simple reason that capital is about accumulation, it’s about growth.

And what we’re moving to right now is a situation of low growth, but continuous capital accumulation by that small group that controls most of the resources. And so three percent growth is going on for them, and their rates of remuneration continue to rise. I mean, I thought it was obscene and wrote violently about it back in 2003, when the leading hedge fund managers around New York City in one year received 250 million dollars of personal compensation just for themsemlves, I thought that was grossly and absolutely unethical. And then in the middle of the crisis just two years ago, the top five hedge fund owners in New York received, in personal remuneration, three billion dollars each in one year.

Now what my students say to me is, ‘How do you become one of those?’

And I say, ‘Well, you know, you can go try, but they’ve got it all locked up, there’s no way you’re gonna get it; the only way you can get a piece of that action is to make sure you reclaim it back.’
Now when you look at the structure, when you say, look at the bonuses, the billions of bonuses—
(microphone shorts out briefly)

…yeah, bonuses, you know, the thing that struck me about that, the very year they were receiving something like, in Wall Street they were getting something like, 40 billion dollars in bonuses in one year. In that very same year about 2 million people lost their houses to foreclosure. And what that meant was, there was actually a transfer of wealth going on. Because all of those houses, may of which were illegally foreclosed, were actually, then, that wealth was flowing up to the coffers of the bankers. This is what I mean by predatory practices, this is what I mean by stealing. The capitalist class doesn’t actually work anymore; it uses the financial system to steal.

Now one of the things that occurs to me, and I think this is significant, is to start thinking about how to organize political movements that actually have a big impact. And I want to give you just a couple of examples in recent years of political movements that have had a big impact in the short term and have some long term lessons to teach us.

One movement I’ll mention first is the immigrant rights movement of 2006 in the United States. There was at that time a proposal to criminalize all illegal aliens. Now this is a very terrible thing to propose. And what happened was, the response was, immigrant workers, many of them illegal, decided they were not going to go to work. And when they decided that, collectively, suddenly what we saw was: cities stopped. Los Angeles closed down. Chicago closed down. New York almost closed down, San Francisco almost closed own. And many other places, companies seeing what was happening, particularly those employing illegal workers, just decided they weren’t going to open their doors anyway, there was no point.

Now what this showed was a tremendous show of force. A tremendous show of force. We can close whole cities down. And actually when you start to look at it, you see that in closing the city down, you can actually stop capital accumulation.

We saw an unfortunate example of that in the wake of 9/11 in New York City. The city was shut down, you couldn’t pass through the bridges, you couldn’t use the tunnels, you couldn’t move, and that went on for about two or three days. And then all of a sudden people realized if this went on for much longer, this was the end of capitalism. So the mayor came on and said, For god’s sakes, get out your credit cards and start shopping. For god’s sake, get in to the restaurants and go to the Broadway shows and just go back, you know, and… enjoy the… the… the ‘situation.’

So what you need, what is clear, is that if you stop the movement of capital, and it’s very easy to do—-cities are very vulnerable, the food chain into New York City, if you disrupt that, this is a major catastrophe. And there’s a tremendous amount of political power. So one of the thing that we have to think about is how to organize political actions in the city that actually have an impact upon how the city works. And as you do that, start to use that as a threat because we need to mobilize in such a way that we can genuinely threaten major commercial and financial interests.

And one of the other examples I would mention would be a city like Cochabamba in Bolivia or El Alto in Bolivia. I mean, El Alto, essentially, the whole city went on strike. And it brought down two presidents. And because it brought down two presidents, it meant that Evo Morales could get elected.

So yes, indeed, bring down David Cameron, how are you going to do that? But there’s a problem with that, which is you would like to think if you bring down David Cameron, there would be someone on the other side who would do what you want to see done, but there’s not. So what we need to do is to start to build a political force that forces someone on the other side to do what you are asking for. Which is: move away from this gross inequality of wealth, take care of the environmental dilemmas, and do something radically different to end Thatcherism. That is what we have to do. Clean it out, clean it out, start all over again. Start all over again, how do we do that?

Well, you have to start from the bottom up. And this is again something that’s very significant here, that this movement is not guided by some ideology from the top down, it’s guided from the bottom up and that is crucial.

Because until we know how to create democracy at the local level and then build that democracy into configurations that remain democratic right to the top, then we will not be able to implement a program. We will see good ideas co-opted by capital. And that is one of the most serious difficulties of any political movenent; you come up with good ideas, and then they co-opt them for their own purposes. No.

Just going back to the immigrant rights movment, the interesting thing about it was the way it got demobilized was actually dividing immigrants from other low-paid workers. And in particular it pointed to the immigrants, who were mainly Hispanics, and the right wing had this enormous propaganda campaign in which it said that basically: ‘Unemployment in the African American community is due to Latin American immigration.’ It divided. It divided. And because it divided, it ruled.

So one of the things that it seems to me that’s terrific about these assemblies, is that it seems to me there is a spirit that says, ‘Even though we are very different and have different ideas, we will not be divided. Furthermore, not only will we not be divided, but we will not be diverted.’

Because the way in which they operate is generally to create some sort of argument that kind of says, ‘Well, you’re really talking about the wrong thing, why don’t you worry about this over here, rather than worry about that over there.’ In other words, there are tremendous attemps in the media and elsewhere to divert you from what it is you want to do. Tremendous attempts will be fostered to divide you.

And it will be hard sometimes. I mean, I’ve been in political movements where it’s hard not to be divided. It’s hard to stick with your own position and at the same time compromise with others who have very different positions. These are not easy things to do. But if you set yourself the rule: I will not be diverted, I will not, we will not be divided. Then it seems to me, you have a long way to go and in fact you’re gonna have a terrific impact upon the political climate of this country.

So these, it seems to me, are some of the issues that I would want to bring to the table. I left New York about four days before they occupied wall street so I haven’t actually been to Wall Street yet, this is my first time to one of these meetings. And I think this is absolutely great, and I think when I get back I’m gonna get to try to get together with the Wall Street folk as well. And what I’m sure they would want me to say to you is: Keep the struggle going. Keep going. The struggle continues, as they say. Keep it going. And that is the crucial question: that we have to be persistent, as well as undiverted and undivided.

So I’m going to stop here because I want to have more of a conversation and get kind of responses from what you think, and how you think, because I want to take some ideas back with me to the United States when I get there and perhaps also when I return to Argentina, try to have some conversations there. Because this movement is not just about London. You’re in the heart of the beast, the belly of the beast. And your job is to give the beast stomachache.

But the more stomachache they get, the more grouchy they’re likely to get. So you have to understand that that is likely to happen. And then you have to stiffen your resolve. This is going to be a long haul for all of this, I think, and so I congratulate you on what you’ve done. This is a marvelous kind of site, I think it’s a marvelous initiative that you’ve taken, and I think that, like I say, this is going to change politics in a very fundamental way. And keep at it, keep at it, keep at it.”

Transcript by Elaine Castillo.

David Harvey: Conversations with History

Distinguished geographer David Harvey joins host Harry Kreisler for a discussion of how the analytic tools of geography and Marxism can contribute to our understanding of the new imperialism. Series: "Conversations with History" [10/2004] [Public Affairs] [Humanities] [Show ID: 8800]

Social Justice and the City (Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation) by David Harvey

Throughout his distinguished and influential career, David Harvey has defined and redefined the relationship among politics, capitalism, and the social aspects of geographical theory. Laying out Harvey's position that geography could not remain objective in the face of urban poverty and associated ills, Social Justice and the City is perhaps the most widely cited work in the field.

Harvey analyzes core issues in city planning and policy--employment and housing location, zoning, transport costs, concentrations of poverty--asking in each case about the relationship between social justice and space. How, for example, do built-in assumptions about planning reinforce existing distributions of income? Rather than leading him to liberal, technocratic solutions, Harvey's line of inquiry pushes him in the direction of a "revolutionary geography," one that transcends the structural limitations of existing approaches to space. Harvey's emphasis on rigorous thought and theoretical innovation gives the volume an enduring appeal. This is a book that raises big questions, and for that reason geographers and other social scientists regularly return to it.

"One of the most influential books in human geography, Social Justice and the City is a generative work that has influenced decades of urban studies scholars. Harvey skillfully demonstrates the material forces that produce cities, urban geographies, and the problems that are often associated with them. In so doing, he opened up new territory for understanding some of the fundamental and enduring problems of the city." --Laura Pulido, author of Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles

"Several comfortable notions . . . are profoundly shaken in this extraordinary book." --Annals of the Association of American Geographers

"A penetrating analysis of contemporary urbanism which may indeed be the signal for a change of direction, if not a revolution, in geographic thought. The time is certainly ripe for this. But it will appeal to and stimulate many other disciplines and professions. It will be controversial for it brings into question concepts and values that are fundamental to our way of life." --Times Higher Education Supplement 

David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His many books include A Brief History of Neoliberalism and Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

Neoliberalism--the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action--has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.

"Harvey's book is deeply insightful, rewarding and stimulating. His history of neoliberalism may indeed be brief, but the richness and profundity of this volume is without question."--Michael J. Thompson, democratiya

"Presents a concise but extremely well-documented economic history of the last three decades, encompassing not only the usual G-7 countries but the entire world, with a particular emphasis on the US and capitalist China."-- Brian Holmes, Interactivist Info Exchange

"David Harvey has done it again. He has provided us with the most lively, readable, comprehensive, and critical guide to what might be called 'the condition of neoliberalism', uncovering its origins, tracing its spread around the globe, and exposing its devastating effects on the vast majority of people everywhere."--Leo Panitch, Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy, York University, Toronto

"With characteristic brilliance, David Harvey offers a razor-sharp analysis of the history and current condition of neoliberalism. In an intellectually extraordinary tour de force, he dissects the contradictions between the freedoms offered by neoliberalism and the liberties desired by the people. This book convincingly demonstrates how neoliberalism restores class power, flirts openly with authoritarianism, and undermines democratic impulses. With democracy under siege, freedom's prospect resides squarely in the struggle for new political governance. A must read if you want to know the state we are in and how to change it."--Erik Swyngedouw, Professor of Geography, University of Oxford

"This book compellingly challenges arguments praising the supposed advantages of neoliberalism. This is particularly important when the claim that there is no alternative to neoliberal restructing has been largely accepted... Harvey 's assessment of the shortcomings of neoliberalism and the practices used to distract attention from these shortcomings is indispensable to discussions of neoliberal policies."--Aaron Peron Ogletree, J.D. The Journal of Buddhist Ethics and The Electronic Journal of Sociology

"Leave it to David Harvey to brilliantly summarize in little more than 200 pages what has taken more than thirty years to emerge as a political-economic form of governance."--The Professional Geographer

"The many strengths of A Brief History of Neoliberalism cannot be adequately conveyed in this short space, but include powerful analyses of the devastating impact of neo-liberalism on the environment and labouring conditions (especially for women), a nuanced perspective on the external and internal forces compelling states to turn towards neo-liberalism, and the ways in which Marx's concept of "primitive accumulation" is highly pertinent to the neo-liberal era of capitalism."--Labour/Le Travail

David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He formerly held professorial posts at Oxford University and The Johns Hopkins University, and has written extensively on the political economy of globalization, urbanization, and cultural change. Oxford University Press published his book 'The New Imperialism' in September 2003 (reissued in paperback February 2005).

The New Imperialism (Clarendon Lectures in Geography and Environmental Studies) by David Harvey

People around the world are confused and concerned. Is it a sign of strength or of weakness that the US has suddenly shifted from a politics of consensus to one of coercion on the world stage? What was really at stake in the war on Iraq? Was it all about oil and, if not, what else was involved? What role has a sagging economy played in pushing the US into foreign adventurism? What exactly is the relationship between US militarism abroad and domestic politics? These are the questions taken up in this compelling and original book. In this closely argued and clearly written book, David Harvey, one of the leading social theorists of his generation, builds a conceptual framework to expose the underlying forces at work behind these momentous shifts in US policies and politics. The compulsions behind the projection of US power on the world as a "new imperialism" are here, for the first time, laid bare for all to see.

Harvey is scholarly but adamant about the hidden dynamics behind the U.S. war on Iraq. Though the U.S. does not fit the old model of an imperial nation, it nonetheless has shown such predilections for some time. Harvey cites the U.S.' ruthlessness in pressing global hegemony since the 1800s, including the internment of Japanese in World War II and the recent Patriot and Homeland Security Acts. Exploring the geopolitical and economic issues that are driving the hostilities in Iraq, Harvey views the war as a diversion from domestic issues and a perfect opportunity for neoconservatives to press their hegemonic agenda. He examines the symbiotic and parasitic relationship between Wall Street, the U.S. Treasury, and the International Monetary Fund as he explores how the U.S. has used an array of tactics, from trade embargoes to military force, to gain geopolitical influence. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"A high accessible and thought-provoking book." --The Professional Geographer

"He makes an important theoretical contribution to understanding contemporary empire's vicissitudes'."--The Times Higher Education Supplement

"The New Imperialism merits the widest possible public. David Harvey is a social theorist known for a cool, analytical style born of interdisciplinary inquiry, coupled with a keen feeling for political significance. This book showcases his talent.'"--The Boston Phoenix

"Navigating effortlessly between history, economics, geography and politics, with persuasive argument and lucid prose, David Harvey places today's headlines in context and makes sense of the early twenty-first century maelstrom we're all caught up in. His concept of accumulation by dispossession will go far. 'The New Imperialism' is a truly useful book."--Susan George, Associate Director, The Transnational Institute, Amsterdam

David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor, Ph.D Program in Anthropology, City University of New York.  

 

David Harvey: A Critical Reader (Antipode Book Series)

This book critically interrogates the work of David Harvey, one of the world’s most influential geographers, and one of its best known Marxists.

• Considers the entire range of Harvey’s oeuvre, from the nature of urbanism to environmental issues.
• Written by contributors from across the human sciences, operating with a range of critical theories.
• Focuses on key themes in Harvey’s work.
• Contains a consolidated bibliography of Harvey’s writings. 

David Harvey is among the most distinguished and influential Marxist theorists of his generation. For over three decades he has published works of major insight and originality that have challenged and altered dominant intellectual-political frameworks of understanding in urban studies, geography, sociology and beyond. He remains one of the most trenchant contemporary critics of global capitalism and its effects.

This book critically interrogates Harvey’s work as a geographer, a Marxist and a public intellectual. Comprising a series of newly commissioned essays written by contributors from across the human sciences, it considers the entire range of Harvey’s oeuvre, from the nature of urbanism and the role of space in capitalist accumulation to environmental issues and postmodernism. To aid further study and research, the volume also contains a consolidated bibliography of Harvey’s writings.

Noel Castree is a Professor in the School of Environment and Development at Manchester University. His previous publications include Nature: The Adventures of an Idea (2005), Spaces of Work (2004), Social Nature (Blackwell Publishing, 2001) and Remaking Reality (1998).

Derek Gregory is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. His previous publications include The Colonial Present (Blackwell Publishing, 2004) and Geographical Imaginations (Blackwell Publishing, 1995).

"The debates in David Harvey: A Critical Reader highlight the importance of thinking about space as something materially produced and in process ... The discussion also leads to considerations of the urban as a way of life. The tension between these two strands makes this anthology fertile ground for attempts at a synthesis."
Radical Philosophy

"David Harvey: A Critical Reader is a landmark assessment of the work, and diverse influences, of this leading geographer-cum-social theorist. No stodgy hagiography, the Reader presents a series of punchy, personal, political, and often profound reflections on four decades of Harvey’s contributions. In locating Harvey and his interlocutors, the Reader also suggestively maps out the shifting terrain of critical thinking around the spatialities of late capitalism." Jamie Peck, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Few contemporary thinkers have been untouched by David Harvey, even in opposition, as this collection of brilliant essays attests. And, after the critics’ scalpels have done their bit of nip and tuck, he comes off still looking rather well for his age." R. A. Walker, University of California, Berkeley

"The Critical Reader offers a set of inspiring and non-hagiographic reflections on the intellectual legacy of David Harvey that will be an invaluable read not only for geographers but for all social scientists committed to the pursuit of a critical and transformative understanding of the world."
Ugo Rossi, Universita L’Orientale of Naples, Italy

Marxist Geographer David Harvey on the G20, the Financial Crisis and Neoliberalism

For some analysis on the G20 summit and the financial crisis, we speak to a leading thinker on the global economy. David Harvey is a Marxist geographer and distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of several books, including The Limits to Capital and A Brief History of Neoliberalism. [includes rush transcript]



David Harvey, Marxist geographer and distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has been teaching Karl Marx’s Capital for nearly forty years and is the author of several books, including The Limits to Capital and A Brief History of Neoliberalism. He has a lengthy discussion of the financial crisis in the latest issue of n+1 magazine. 



AMY GOODMAN: For some analysis on the G20 summit in London and the financial crisis overall, I’m joined now by a leading thinker on the global economy, David Harvey. He’s a Marxist geographer and distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He’s author of several books, including The Limits to Capital and A Brief History of Neoliberalism. He has a lengthy interview on the financial crisis in the latest issue of n+1 magazine, nplusonemag.com. David Harvey joins us now on Democracy Now!

We welcome you to Democracy Now!

DAVID HARVEY: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think is the—what is being proposed by the G20 leaders? And what needs to be done in this country?

DAVID HARVEY: I think Tony Benn was exactly right in the earlier segment, and it’s a great pleasure to be here after him. I was always an admirer of his.

What they’re trying to do is to reinvent the same system. And I think this is a collective concern, and there’s a lot of squabbling on the details, as it were. But the fundamental argument they are making is, how can we actually reconstitute the same sort of capitalism we had and have had over the last thirty years in a slightly more regulated, benevolent form, but don’t challenge the fundamentals? And I think it’s time we challenge the fundamentals.

AMY GOODMAN: What are those fundamentals?

DAVID HARVEY: The fundamentals have to do with the incredible increase in consolidation, if you like, of class power. I mean, since the 1970s, we’ve seen a tremendous increase in inequality, not just simply in this country, but worldwide. And in effect, the assets of the world have been accumulated more and more and more in few hands. And I think when you look at the nature of the bailout programs, the stimulus programs and all the rest of it, what it really does is to, in effect, try to keep those assets intact while making the rest of us pay. And so, I think it’s time we stopped that and kind of said, well, actually, we should actually be getting more of the assets and, you know, much greater equality.

AMY GOODMAN: And how would we get more of the assets? How would there be greater equality?

DAVID HARVEY: I think, for example, the nature of the bailout of the banks and the sort of restructuring that is going on is, in effect, about saving the banks and saving the bankers, while actually sticking it to the people. I mean, we’re the ones who are going to have to pay for this in the long run. So what I’m kind of arguing for is a political awareness that that is happening.

In fact, it has been happening over the last thirty years, sort of step by step. It’s been disguised in this kind of rhetoric about individual liberty and freedom of markets and all those kinds of things. But if you look backwards, you will see that this is not the first financial crisis we’ve had. We’ve had many of them over the last thirty years, and they all have the same character. We had our own savings and loan crisis back in the 1980s. There was a Mexican debt crisis back in 1982, when, in effect, Mexico was going to go bankrupt. And if they had gone bankrupt, then the New York investment banks would have gone under. So what did they do? They bailed out Mexico, therefore bailing out the New York investment bankers, and then they made the Mexican people pay.

AMY GOODMAN: Why would the banks in New York have gone under?

DAVID HARVEY: Because they had lent the money to Mexico in the first place. And if Mexico had just defaulted on its debt, what would the—you know, what would the bankers have done? They would have lost a tremendous amount.

AMY GOODMAN: If you were Timothy Geithner, if you were the Treasury Secretary—

DAVID HARVEY: Yes, if I was Treasury Secretary.

AMY GOODMAN: —what exactly would you be doing?

DAVID HARVEY: Oh, I would take a lot of that money, and I would put it into some kind of a national reconstruction corporation. And I would say, “Look, your first duty is to take care of the foreclosure crisis and the people who have been foreclosed upon. So go into cities like Cleveland and so on that have been devastated, and go into sort of areas in California and so on and take care of the foreclosure crisis.”

AMY GOODMAN: How would you do that?

DAVID HARVEY: Well, I think one of the ways you could do that is to start to buy out all of those houses that are about to be foreclosed on and put them into some kind of, I don’t know, municipal housing association or some collective form of that kind, and then allow people to remain in those houses, even though they’re no longer necessarily owners. So the ownership rights would shift.

I mean, we have a myth in this country that homeownership is the gospel, as it were. But for a lot of people, homeownership is not a good idea. And I think, actually, it’s not a good idea in general.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

DAVID HARVEY: For two reasons. One is, it makes you actually very vulnerable if you’re a heavily debt-encumbered homeowner. And actually, the initial legislation was kind of interesting, the debate around it back in the 1930s, when it kind of said debt-encumbered homeowners don’t go on strike, and because it’s—you know, you’ve got to pay your mortgage. And so, this becomes, as it were, a millstone around your neck. And that then makes you very vulnerable to fluctuations in the market like we’re seeing right now, particularly if you have variable rate mortgages, things of that kind, and you can really easily get caught out. So, in effect, what we’ve seen in the housing market is a tremendous plundering of the assets of some of the most vulnerable people in the country. I mean, this has been the biggest loss of asset wealth to the African American population that there’s ever been.

AMY GOODMAN: And the response of some that, well, they should never have bought houses to begin with, because they couldn’t afford them?

DAVID HARVEY: Well, some of them, so that’s right, you know, but this is a familiar story. The first wave of foreclosures was really in impoverished neighborhoods, African American, immigrant and very often single-headed household women. And, yeah, they probably should not have become homeowners. But on the other hand, they were taking a risk. But who took the real big risks in this economy, if it wasn’t the bankers? So, in a sense, they’re being made to pay, while the bankers are still walking away with a tremendous amount of money.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the connection between gentrification and the mortgage crisis?

DAVID HARVEY: The gentrification process in here in New York and the like was again about kind of reconstructing urban environments in such a way, and a lot of that reconstruction entailed, particularly when it was corporate-led, entailed a big investment in housing. You then have the problem of who’s going to buy the housing. And it’s not only gentrification, it’s also a lot of that new development, new condominiums and all the rest of it.

And it’s kind of interesting. Finance controls both the creation of housing, the production of housing, and also its consumption. You lend money to the developers. They go in and gentrify a neighborhood. You lend them money to the people who are going to occupy it. And even if they don’t have—you’ve got to find that market for the gentrification once that process goes on. And so, the connection there in this, the financial operators are working on both ends of this game, if you like.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what you mean by “the right to the city”?

DAVID HARVEY: What I mean by the right to the city is that we have, I think, a real need right now to democratize decisions as to how a city shall be and what it should be about, so that we can actually have, if you like, a collective project about reshaping urban—the urban world. I mean, here in this city, effectively, the right to the city has been held by the mayor and the Development Office and the developers and the financiers. Most of us don’t really have a very strong say. I mean, there are kind of community organizations and so on. So I think the democratization of the city, of city decision making, is crucial. And I think we want to reclaim the right to the city for all of us, so that we can all actually not only have access to what exists in the city, but also be able to reshape the city in a different image, in a different way, which is more socially just, more environmentally sustainable and so on.

AMY GOODMAN: What does this current crisis mean for the future of capitalism, David Harvey?

DAVID HARVEY: You know, crises are terribly important in the history of capitalism. They are what I would call the kind of irrational rationalizers of the system. What happens is that capitalism develops in a certain way, has real problems, then it goes into crisis, and it comes phoenix-like out of it in another form. We went through a long crisis in the 1970s. There was a long crisis in the 1930s. So a crisis, then, is a moment of reconfiguration of what capitalism is going to be about. And right now, as I’ve said, the powers that be are more about trying to reconstruct the pre-existing power structure or save the pre-existing power structure without intervening in it in any way.

The way I see it right now is, however, we may be in a different kind of world. Put it this way. Capitalism historically has grown at a 2.5 percent compound rate of growth since 1750. OK. And in good years, it’s growing at three percent. Obama, the other day, said, “Well, in a couple of years, we’ll be back to three percent growth.” Gordon Brown says, “Well, actually, the economy will double in the next few years.” Now, when capitalism was constituted by everything going on around Manchester and a few other hot spots in 1750, three percent compound growth rate was no problem. You’re now looking at a situation where you’re going to say three percent compound rate of growth on everything that’s going on in East and Southeast Asia, Europe, North America and everywhere in the world. We’re looking at a different kind of world.

The total economy back in, say, 1750 was about $135 billion. It was $4 trillion by the time you get to 1950. It’s $40 trillion by the time you get to 2000. It’s now $56 trillion. If it doubles in the next year, we’re talking about $100 trillion. And by 2030, you’re going to have to find three trillion employment, if you like, profitable opportunities for capital to operate at that point.

Now, there are limits, if you like, and I think we’re hitting those limits environmentally, socially, politically. And I think it’s time we started really thinking about an alternative. In other words, we have to think about a zero-growth economy.

AMY GOODMAN: What does that mean?

DAVID HARVEY: It means that instead of growing at three percent per year, you just keep it constant.

AMY GOODMAN: And how do you do that?

DAVID HARVEY: And that means a completely—it means it has to be non-capitalist, because that means there’s not going to be any profit around for anybody to have. In effect, you’re going to have to have a nonprofit economy. And how you do that, of course, is a big, big question. I’m not—I don’t have the blueprint for it. But I think that this is one of the key questions we should be thinking about right now. And what disturbs me is we’re going through this crisis right now, and we’re not asking those kinds of big questions that we should be asking.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you make of the massive protest against the, well, smallest percentage of the bailout money, which is going to the executives, certainly something people can identify with?

DAVID HARVEY: Well, I got—actually, I got upset about all this fuss about the AIG. I mean, we’re talking about $165 million in bonuses or 220? Last January 2008, the Wall Street bonuses collectively came in at $32 billion. OK. And at that time, two million people had already lost their houses. Figure, two million people have lost their houses; Wall Street rewards itself $32 billion. Nobody got angry about that. And I was extremely angry about that. It seemed to me this was class robbery. This is like the bankers going down into the hold of a sinking ship and grabbing all the gold and going up and getting on a lifeboat and then disappearing and then leaving everybody else on this sinking ship. And at that time, I thought that was outrageous. And that’s $32 billion instead of this $165 or $235 million we’re talking about.

That money is already gone. I mean, when this guy wrote in to the New York Times, kind of saying, “I’m not going to—I’m just going to give mine away”—he’s going to give away $740,000 or something. And he said, “But my family is not affected.” But there are people starving right now in many parts of the world. Children are starving because of this. Nothing’s happening about that. And that seems to me—

AMY GOODMAN: So what’s the difference between last year and now?

DAVID HARVEY: The difference between last year and now is that, actually, the thing has got much worse. I mean, the toxic assets, if you like, become more and more apparent. And we’ve had, of course, the destruction of the investment banks, Lehman going bankrupt and the others merging, and so on. So I think the difference right now is that Wall Street is clearly having to completely reconstitute itself.

But I don’t think we should kid ourselves into thinking that actually there’s not a lot of money—people are still making good money on Wall Street.

AMY GOODMAN: Who?

DAVID HARVEY: It’s just it’s consolidated now, as it were. We’ve got four major banks left in this country. And it’s a tremendous centralization and consolidation of class power.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Harvey, what is neoliberalism?

DAVID HARVEY: Neoliberalism, for me, was a political project, which formed in the 1970s. And it was a political project to try to consolidate and reconstruct class power. And it did it, if you like, through a whole kind of set of mechanisms about privatization, about free markets, individual responsibility, withdrawal of the state from social provision. But the state never withdrew from the economy. I mean, that’s a myth. The state has been bailing people out all along. Actually, the savings and loan crisis, I mentioned earlier.

But as soon as the big guns get into trouble, the state bails them out. And this is what we call moral hazard, that actually because you’re bailing out Wall Street all of the time, then Wall Street will take high risks. And they’ve taken immensely high risks over the last thirty years and again and again and again being caught out. And each time they get caught out, the state steps in and saves them. That’s the connection, if you like, between the state and Wall Street. That’s the connection that has to be broken.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you see as the role of social movements?

DAVID HARVEY: I think right now it’s a desperate moment, in the sense that if we’re going to come out of this crisis in any different kind of way, it’s going to be because of the formation of very strong social movements that say enough is enough. We’ve got to change the world in a very, very different way.

Now, social movements of this kind don’t sort of form overnight. They take a little while. I mean, it’s interesting when you look back. In 1929, there’s the stock market crash. The social movements didn’t really start getting into motion until 1932, ’33. It took about three years. Right now, I think we’re in a legitimation crisis. They’re trying to rescue the system as is. And I think more and more people are beginning to say this is an illegitimate system, and therefore we have to think about doing something different.

Out of that, likely to come, all kinds of different social movements. We have this movement, which is a relatively new movement, called the Right to the City movement. It’s here in New York City, and it’s several other cities in the United States. There’s a national coalition. It’s small right now, and it’s getting its act together. But these kinds of things can grow very fast, very quickly. So there is likely to be many movements of that kind.

In other countries, there are already quite massive social movements. This country is a little bit behind on that trajectory.

AMY GOODMAN: And what would you identify as those massive social movements elsewhere?

DAVID HARVEY: In Brazil, for example, there are—there is a Right to the City movement in Brazil around housing provision and dwelling and so on. There’s a landless peasants’ movement in Brazil, which is very, very active and very successful in many of the things that it does. So, those movements are really very strong. There’s a peasant movement in India, too, which is actually really quite, quite strong.

And so, I think there’s a real moment here, where we also have to think about these things getting together globally, which is, of course, where the World Social Forum originated. And so, there are ways in which we can start to think about coordination between different parts of the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Harvey, how does war fit into this? US is still pursuing the war in Iraq, though President Obama says that we will eventually withdraw there, but expanding the war now in Afghanistan, not just 17,000 more troops, then another 4,000—that made it 21,000—today the Pentagon asking for another 10,000 troops?

DAVID HARVEY: Right, right. Well, interestingly, there’s two aspects to this. First, you know, since 1945, what you call the military-industrial complex, it’s been a terribly important vehicle in American development. It has been the center of what we call military Keynesianism. I mean, it’s the one sector where deficit financing was thoroughly permitted, and it was the one sector under Reagan that expanded immensely and has never been let go, in spite of the end of the Cold War. So there’s been a very important economic function to what the military is about.

The second thing is that, as we’ve seen over the last couple of years, commodity prices are very unstable. And command over commodities and resources becomes absolutely crucial. So, in my view, a lot of the interventionism in the Middle East and elsewhere has been clearly built around US interest in controlling oil supplies. And it’s not only about that, but it’s very strongly connected with that, so that then arguments are made about, well, we’ve got to get rid of a dictator. Well, there have been plenty of dictators around the world the United States has not taken any notice of, because it didn’t control oil. And so, the kind of war machine, if you like, and the covert machines starts to become very important in terms of maintaining corporate access to the resources of the world and, at some point, also to the labor resources of the world, not only the natural resources.

AMY GOODMAN: How do you see the US in relation to the rest of the world, the balance of power? US versus Europe, US and China—do you see China emerging as the major dominant economic power?

DAVID HARVEY: No, I don’t see it becoming the major dominant economic power. I think there was this National Intelligence Council report, which came out last year. It kind of said, basically, the US is no longer going to be the dominant power in the world. It’s going to be a very important player in the world, but we have to look forward to a multi-polar world, in which East and Southeast Asia, for example, is economically as powerful as the United States. The European Union, if it gets its act together, is likely to be as powerful as the United States. So the United States has to look towards a multi-polar world.

That’s actually both unstable and potentially rather dangerous. Whether we like what the US has done with its domination, at least there was only the US versus the Soviet Union kind of world. When you start to look at the multi-polar world, you start to think back to what happened to the 1930s, when the groups decided they were going to go it alone and got into economic conflict between each other. And I worry about the future—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “the groups”?

DAVID HARVEY: At that time, the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere; Germany, with its own kind of interests; the British. And, you know, everybody was going it alone. And I think the threat of the G20 is what we’re going to see as sort of a fracturing of the global economy along those lines. And that could be a good thing, in the sense that if there is fracturing and coalitions emerging at the same time, that’s one thing, but if it turns into fracturing and then rivalries between the power blocs, I think that would be very dangerous.

AMY GOODMAN: Your assessment of President Obama?

DAVID HARVEY: I think he needs a really, really strong, powerful social movement behind him to do the things he really needs to do. Right now, he has to deal with Congress. And, you know, there’s a group in Congress I would call the party of Wall Street, that is deeply implanted in the Democratic Party, it’s deeply implanted in the Republican Party. And so, he can’t do battle with Wall Street, given the significance of the party of Wall Street in Congress. I mean, for example, our New York senator, Charles Schumer, has raised immense moneys from Wall Street, and he’s a great friend of Wall Street. And so, the Democrats are not going to go against Wall Street. And one way or another, the Republicans are not going to go against Wall Street. So. I don’t know exactly where Obama would like to go, but certainly he can’t go against Wall Street, unless a whole bunch of people really force him to.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you see neoliberalism as dead? And what gives you the most hope?

DAVID HARVEY: I don’t see the neoliberalism as dead, if you say that neoliberalism is about consolidation of class power, because actually we’re seeing the further consolidation of it right now, rather than the lessening of it. And that’s what I—when I talk about the bank bailout, that’s what it was doing. So I’m kind of concerned.

AMY GOODMAN: Were you for no bank bailouts?

DAVID HARVEY: Well, I was in favor of solving the foreclosure crisis. You see, if you’ve solved the housing crisis, the banks wouldn’t be holding any toxic assets. If you had gone in and bailed out all of the people, there would be no problem on Wall Street. They wouldn’t be sitting there with all the toxic assets. You wouldn’t have the foreclosures. So we should have gone in there right at the beginning and actually held down the foreclosure crisis.

AMY GOODMAN: And why didn’t they?

DAVID HARVEY: Because that would mean bailing out poor African Americans and people of that sort, and they’re not concerned with that. They’re concerned with protecting the bankers, not with protecting the people.

This then gives me hope, you see, because I think now that people might see it, that that is actually what’s been happening over the last thirty years and is really highlighted now—I mean, it hits you in the face straightaway. You know, this is what’s happening. And something different has to happen. Some sort of movement has to come out and say, “Look, enough is enough. We’re not going to continue in this particular way.”

AMY GOODMAN: Professor David Harvey, I want to thank you very much for being with us.

DAVID HARVEY: I thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: David Harvey is a Marxist geographer and distinguished professor of anthropology at the CUNY Grad Center. That’s the City University of New York. The Limits to Capital, one of his books, A Brief History of Neoliberalism.



Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/2/marxist_geographer_david_harvey_on_the

Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition By David Harvey

The historical geography of capitalist development is at a key inflexion point in which the geographical configurations of power are rapidly shifting at the very moment when the temporal dynamic is facing very serious constraints.  Three-percent compound annual growth (generally considered the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy) is becoming less and less feasible to sustain without resort to all manner of fictions (such as those that have characterized asset markets and financial affairs over the last two decades).  There are good reasons to believe that there is no alternative to a new global order of governance that will eventually have to manage the transition to a zero growth economy.  If that is to be done in an equitable way, then there is no alternative to socialism or communism.  Since the late 1990s, the World Social Forum became the center for articulating the theme "another world is possible."  It must now take up the task of defining how another socialism or communism is possible and how the transition to these alternatives is to be accomplished.  The current crisis offers a window of opportunity to reflect on what might be involved.

The current crisis originated in the steps taken to resolve the crisis of the1970s.  These steps included:

(a) The successful assault upon organized labor and its political institutions while mobilizing global labor surpluses, instituting labor-saving technological changes, and heightening competition.  The result has been global wage repressions (a declining share of wages in total GDP almost everywhere) and the creation of an even vaster disposable labor reserve living under marginal conditions.

(b) Undermining previous structures of monopoly power and displacing the previous stage of (nation-state) monopoly capitalism by opening up capitalism to far fiercer international competition.  Intensifying global competition translated into lower non-financial corporate profits.  Uneven geographical development and inter-territorial competition became key features in capitalist development, opening the way towards the beginnings of a hegemonic shift of power particularly but not exclusively towards East Asia.

(c) Utilizing and empowering the most fluid and highly mobile form of capital -- money capital -- to reallocate capital resources globally (eventually through electronic markets) thus sparking deindustrialization in traditional core regions and new forms of (ultra-oppressive) industrialization and natural resource and agricultural raw material extractions in emergent markets.  The corollary was to enhance the profitability of financial corporations and to find new ways to globalize and supposedly absorb risks through the creation of fictitious capital markets.

(d) At the other end of the social scale, this meant heightened reliance on "accumulation by dispossession" as a means to augment capitalist class power.  The new rounds of primitive accumulation against indigenous and peasant populations were augmented by asset losses of the lower classes in the core economies (as witnessed by the sub-prime housing market in the US which foisted a huge asset loss particularly upon African American populations).

(e) The augmentation of otherwise sagging effective demand by pushing the debt economy (governmental, corporate, and household) to its limits (particularly in the USA and the UK but also in many other countries from Latvia to Dubai).

(f) Compensating for anemic rates of return in production by the construction of a whole series of asset market bubbles, all of which had a Ponzi character, culminating in the property bubble that burst in 2007-8.  These asset bubbles drew upon finance capital and were facilitated by extensive financial innovations such as derivatives and collateralized debt obligations.

The political forces that coalesced and mobilized behind these transitions had a distinctive class character and clothed themselves in the vestments of a distinctive ideology called neoliberal.  The ideology rested upon the idea that free markets, free trade, personal initiative, and entrepreneurialism were the best guarantors of individual liberty and freedom and that the "nanny state" should be dismantled for the benefit of all.  But the practice entailed that the state must stand behind the integrity of financial institutions, thus introducing (beginning with the Mexican and developing countries debt crisis of 1982) "moral hazard" big time into the financial system.  The state (local and national) also became increasingly committed to providing a "good business climate" to attract investments in a highly competitive environment.  The interests of the people were secondary to the interests of capital, and in the event of a conflict between them, the interests of the people had to be sacrificed (as became standard practice in IMF structural adjustments programs from the early 1980s onwards).  The system that has been created amounts to a veritable form of communism for the capitalist class.

These conditions varied considerably, of course, depending upon what part of the world one inhabited, the class relations prevailing there, the political and cultural traditions, and how the balance of political-economic power was shifting.

So how can the left negotiate the dynamics of this crisis?  At times of crisis, the irrationality of capitalism becomes plain for all to see.  Surplus capital and surplus labor exist side by side with seemingly no way to put them back together in the midst of immense human suffering and unmet needs.  In midsummer of 2009, one third of the capital equipment in the United States stood idle, while some 17 per cent of the workforce were either unemployed, enforced part-timers, or "discouraged" workers.  What could be more irrational than that!

Can capitalism survive the present trauma?  Yes.  But at what cost?  This question masks another.  Can the capitalist class reproduce its power in the face of the raft of economic, social, political, geopolitical, and environmental difficulties?  Again, the answer is a resounding "yes."  But the mass of the people will have to surrender the fruits of their labor to those in power, to surrender many of their rights and their hard-won asset values (in everything from housing to pension rights), and to suffer environmental degradations galore, to say nothing of serial reductions in their living standards, which means starvation for many of those already struggling to survive at rock bottom.  Class inequalities will increase (as we already see happening).  All of that may require more than a little political repression, police violence, and militarized state control to stifle unrest.

Since much of this is unpredictable and since the spaces of the global economy are so variable, then uncertainties as to outcomes are heightened at times of crisis.  All manner of localized possibilities arise for either nascent capitalists in some new space to seize opportunities to challenge older class and territorial hegemonies (as when Silicon Valley replaced Detroit from the mid-1970s onwards in the United States) or for radical movements to challenge the reproduction of an already destabilized class power.  To say that the capitalist class and capitalism can survive is not to say that they are predestined to do so nor does it say that their future character is given.  Crises are moments of paradox and possibilities.

So what will happen this time around?  If we are to get back to three-percent growth, then this means finding new and profitable global investment opportunities for $1.6 trillion in 2010 rising to closer to $3 trillion by 2030.  This contrasts with the $0.15 trillion new investment needed in 1950 and the $0.42 trillion needed in 1973 (the dollar figures are inflation adjusted).  Real problems of finding adequate outlets for surplus capital began to emerge after 1980, even with the opening up of China and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc.  The difficulties were in part resolved by creation of fictitious markets where speculation in asset values could take off unhindered.  Where will all this investment go now?

Leaving aside the undisputable constraints in the relation to nature (with global warming of paramount importance), the other potential barriers of effective demand in the market place, of technologies, and of geographical/geopolitical distributions are likely to be profound, even supposing, which is unlikely, that no serious active oppositions to continuous capital accumulation and further consolidation of class power materialize.  What spaces are left in the global economy for new spatial fixes for capital surplus absorption?  China and the ex-Soviet bloc have already been integrated.  South and Southeast Asia is filling up fast.  Africa is not yet fully integrated but there is nowhere else with the capacity to absorb all this surplus capital.  What new lines of production can be opened up to absorb growth?  There may be no effective long-run capitalist solutions (apart from reversion to fictitious capital manipulations) to this crisis of capitalism.  At some point quantitative changes lead to qualitative shifts and we need to take seriously the idea that we may be at exactly such an inflexion point in the history of capitalism.  Questioning the future of capitalism itself as an adequate social system ought, therefore, to be in the forefront of current debate.

Yet there appears to be little appetite for such discussion, even among the left.  Instead we continue to hear the usual conventional mantras regarding the perfectibility of humanity with the help of free markets and free trade, private property and personal responsibility, low taxes and minimalist state involvement in social provision, even though this all sounds increasingly hollow.  A crisis of legitimacy looms.  But legitimation crises typically unfold at a different pace and rhythm to that of stock markets.  It took, for example, three or four years before the stock market crash of 1929 produced the massive social movements (both progressive and fascistic) after 1932 or so.  The intensity of the current pursuit by political power of ways to exit the present crisis may have something to do with the political fear of looming illegitimacy.

The last thirty years, however, has seen the emergence of systems of governance that seem immune to legitimacy problems and unconcerned even with the creation of consent.  The mix of authoritarianism, monetary corruption of representative democracy, surveillance, policing and militarization (particularly through the war on terror), media control and spin suggests a world in which the control of discontent through disinformation, fragmentations of oppositions, and the shaping of oppositional cultures through the promotion of NGOs tends to prevail with plenty of coercive force to back it up if necessary.

The idea that the crisis had systemic origins is scarcely mooted in the mainstream media (even as a few mainstream economists like Stiglitz, Krugman, and even Jeffrey Sachs attempt to steal some of the left's historical thunder by confessing to an epiphany or two).  Most of the governmental moves to contain the crisis in North America and Europe amount to the perpetuation of business as usual which translates into support for the capitalist class.  The "moral hazard" that was the immediate trigger for the financial failures is being taken to new heights in the bank bailouts.  The actual practices of neoliberalism (as opposed to its utopian theory) always entailed blatant support for finance capital and capitalist elites (usually on the grounds that financial institutions must be protected at all costs and that it is the duty of state power to create a good business climate for solid profiteering).  This has not fundamentally changed.  Such practices are justified by appeal to the dubious proposition that a "rising tide" of capitalist endeavor will "lift all boats" or that the benefits of compound growth will magically "trickle down" (which it never does except in the form of a few crumbs from the rich folks' table).

So how will the capitalist class exit the current crisis and how swift will the exit be?  The rebound in stock market values from Shanghai and Tokyo to Frankfurt, London, and New York is a good sign, we are told, even as unemployment pretty much everywhere continues to rise.  But notice the class bias in that measure.  We are enjoined to rejoice in the rebound in stock values for the capitalists because it always precedes, it is said, a rebound in the "real economy" where jobs for the workers are created and incomes earned.  The fact that the last stock rebound in the United States after 2002 turned out to be a "jobless recovery" appears to have been forgotten already.  The Anglo-Saxon public in particular appears to be seriously afflicted with amnesia.  It too easily forgets and forgives the transgressions of the capitalist class and the periodic disasters its actions precipitate.  The capitalist media are happy to promote such amnesia.

China and India are still growing, the former by leaps and bounds.  But in China's case, the cost is a huge expansion of bank lending on risky projects (the Chinese banks were not caught up in the global speculative frenzy but now are continuing it).  The overaccumulation of productive capacity proceeds apace, and long-term infrastructural investments, whose productivity will not be known for several years, are booming (even in urban property markets).  And China's burgeoning demand is entraining those economies supplying raw materials, like Australia and Chile.  The likelihood of a subsequent crash in China cannot be dismissed but it may take time to discern (a long-term version of Dubai).  Meanwhile the global epicenter of capitalism accelerates its shift primarily towards East Asia.

In the older financial centers, the young financial sharks have taken their bonuses of yesteryear and collectively started boutique financial institutions to circle Wall Street and the City of London, to sift through the detritus of yesterday's financial giants to snaffle up the juicy bits and start all over again.  The investment banks that remain in the US -- Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan -- though reincarnated as bank holding companies have gained exemption (thanks to the Federal Reserve) from regulatory requirements and are making huge profits (and setting aside moneys for huge bonuses to match) out of speculating, dangerously using taxpayers' money in unregulated and still booming derivative markets.  The leveraging that got us into the crisis has resumed big time as if nothing has happened.  Innovations in finance are on the march as new ways to package and sell fictitious capital debts are being pioneered and offered to institutions (such as pension funds) desperate to find new outlets for surplus capital.  The fictions (as well as the bonuses) are back!

Consortia are buying up foreclosed properties, either waiting for the market to turn before making a killing or banking high value land for a future moment of active redevelopment.  The regular banks are stashing away cash, much of it garnered from the public coffers, also with an eye to resuming bonus payments consistent with a former lifestyle while a whole host of entrepreneurs hover in the wings waiting to seize this moment of creative destruction backed by a flood of public moneys.

Meanwhile raw money power wielded by the few undermines all semblances of democratic governance.  The pharmaceutical, health insurance, and hospital lobbies, for example, spent more than $133 million in the first three months of 2009 to make sure they got their way on health care reform in the United States.  Max Baucus, head of the key Senate finance committee that shaped the health care bill, received $1.5 million for a bill that delivers a vast number of new clients to the insurance companies with few protections against ruthless exploitation and profiteering (Wall Street is delighted).  Another electoral cycle, legally corrupted by immense money power, will soon be upon us.  In the United States, the parties of "K Street" and of Wall Street will be duly re-elected as working Americans are exhorted to work their way out of the mess that the ruling class has created.  We have been in such dire straits before, we are reminded, and each time, working Americans have rolled up their sleeves, tightened their belts, and saved the system from some mysterious mechanics of auto-destruction for which the ruling class denies all responsibility.  Personal responsibility is, after all, for the workers and not for the capitalists.

If this is the outline of the exit strategy then almost certainly we will be in another mess within five years.  The faster we come out of this crisis and the less excess capital is destroyed now, the less room there will be for the revival of long-term active growth.  The loss of asset values at this conjuncture (mid 2009) is, we are told by the IMF, at least $55 trillion, which is equivalent to almost exactly one year's global output of goods and services.  Already we are back to the output levels of 1989.  We may be looking at losses of $400 trillion or more before we are through.  Indeed, in a recent startling calculation, it was suggested that the US state alone was on the hook to guarantee more than $200 trillion in asset values.  The likelihood that all of those assets would go bad is very minimal, but the thought that many of them could is sobering in the extreme.  Just to take a concrete example: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, now taken over by the US Government, own or guarantee more than $5 trillion in home loans, many of which are in deep trouble (losses of more than $150 billion were recorded in 2008 alone).  So what, then, are the alternatives?

It has long been the dream of many in the world that an alternative to capitalist (ir)rationality can be defined and rationally arrived at through the mobilization of human passions in the collective search for a better life for all.  These alternatives -- historically called socialism or communism -- have, in various times and places, been tried.  In former times, such as the 1930s, the vision of one or other of them operated as a beacon of hope.  But in recent times they have both lost their luster, been dismissed as wanting, not only because of the failure of historical experiments with communism to make good on their promises and the penchant for communist regimes to cover over their mistakes by repression, but also because of their supposedly flawed presuppositions concerning human nature and the potential perfectibility of the human personality and of human institutions.

The difference between socialism and communism is worth noting.  Socialism aims to democratically manage and regulate capitalism in ways that calm its excesses and redistribute its benefits for the common good.  It is about spreading the wealth around through progressive taxation arrangements while basic needs -- such as education, health care and even housing -- are provided by the state out of reach of market forces.  Many of the key achievements of redistributive socialism in the period after 1945, not only in Europe but beyond, have become so socially embedded as to be immune from neoliberal assault.  Even in the United States, Social Security and Medicare are extremely popular programs that right-wing forces find it almost impossible to dislodge.  The Thatcherites in Britain could not touch national health care except at the margins.  Social provision in Scandinavia and most of Western Europe seems to be an unshakable bedrock of the social order.

Communism, on the other hand, seeks to displace capitalism by creating an entirely different mode of both production and distribution of goods and services.  In the history of actually existing communism, social control over production, exchange, and distribution meant state control and systematic state planning.  In the long run this proved to be unsuccessful though, interestingly, its conversion in China (and its earlier adoption in places like Singapore) has proven far more successful than the pure neoliberal model in generating capitalist growth for reasons that cannot be elaborated upon here.  Contemporary attempts to revive the communist hypothesis typically abjure state control and look to other forms of collective social organization to displace market forces and capital accumulation as the basis for organizing production and distribution.  Horizontally networked as opposed to hierarchically commanded systems of coordination between autonomously organized and self-governing collectives of producers and consumers are envisaged as lying at the core of a new form of communism.  Contemporary technologies of communication make such a system seem feasible.  All manner of small-scale experiments around the world can be found in which such economic and political forms are being constructed.  In this there is a convergence of some sort between the Marxist and anarchist traditions that harks back to the broadly collaborative situation between them in the 1860s in Europe.

While nothing is certain, it could be that 2009 marks the beginning of a prolonged shakeout in which the question of grand and far-reaching alternatives to capitalism will step-by-step bubble up to the surface in one part of the world or another.  The longer the uncertainty and the misery is prolonged, the more the legitimacy of the existing way of doing business will be questioned and the more the demand to build something different will escalate.  Radical as opposed to band-aid reforms to patch up the financial system may seem more necessary.

The uneven development of capitalist practices throughout the world has produced, moreover, anti-capitalist movements all over the place.  The state-centric economies of much of East Asia generate different discontents (as in Japan and China) compared to the churning anti-neoliberal struggles occurring throughout much of Latin America where the Bolivarian revolutionary movement of popular power exists in a peculiar relationship to capitalist class interests that have yet to be truly confronted.  Differences over tactics and policies in response to the crisis among the states that make up the European Union are increasing even as a second attempt to come up with a unified EU constitution is under way.  Revolutionary and resolutely anti-capitalist movements are also to be found, though not all of them are of a progressive sort, in many of the marginal zones of capitalism.  Spaces have been opened up within which something radically different in terms of dominant social relations, ways of life, productive capacities, and mental conceptions of the world can flourish.  This applies as much to the Taliban and to communist rule in Nepal as to the Zapatistas in Chiapas and indigenous movements in Bolivia, and the Maoist movements in rural India, even as they are worlds apart in objectives, strategies, and tactics.

The central problem is that in aggregate there is no resolute and sufficiently unified anti-capitalist movement that can adequately challenge the reproduction of the capitalist class and the perpetuation of its power on the world stage.  Neither is there any obvious way to attack the bastions of privilege for capitalist elites or to curb their inordinate money power and military might.  While openings exist towards some alternative social order, no one really knows where or what it is.  But just because there is no political force capable of articulating let alone mounting such a program, this is no reason to hold back on outlining alternatives.

Lenin's famous question "what is to be done?" cannot be answered, to be sure, without some sense of who it is might do it where.  But a global anti-capitalist movement is unlikely to emerge without some animating vision of what is to be done and why.  A double blockage exists: the lack of an alternative vision prevents the formation of an oppositional movement, while the absence of such a movement precludes the articulation of an alternative.  How, then, can this blockage be transcended?  The relation between the vision of what is to be done and why and the formation of a political movement across particular places to do it has to be turned into a spiral.  Each has to reinforce the other if anything is actually to get done.  Otherwise potential opposition will be forever locked down into a closed circle that frustrates all prospects for constructive change, leaving us vulnerable to perpetual future crises of capitalism with increasingly deadly results.  Lenin's question demands an answer.

The central problem to be addressed is clear enough.  Compound growth for ever is not possible and the troubles that have beset the world these last thirty years signal that a limit is looming to continuous capital accumulation that cannot be transcended except by creating fictions that cannot last.  Add to this the facts that so many people in the world live in conditions of abject poverty, that environmental degradations are spiraling out of control, that human dignities are everywhere being offended even as the rich are piling up more and more wealth (the number of billionaires in India doubled last year from 27 to 52) under their command, and that the levers of political, institutional, judicial, military, and media power are under such tight but dogmatic political control as to be incapable of doing much more than perpetuating the status quo and frustrating discontent.

A revolutionary politics that can grasp the nettle of endless compound capital accumulation and eventually shut it down as the prime motor of human history requires a sophisticated understanding of how social change occurs.  The failings of past endeavors to build a lasting socialism and communism have to be avoided and lessons from that immensely complicated history must be learned.  Yet the absolute necessity for a coherent anti-capitalist revolutionary movement must also be recognized.  The fundamental aim of that movement is to assume social command over both the production and distribution of surpluses.

We urgently need an explicit revolutionary theory suited to our times.  I propose a "co-revolutionary theory" derived from an understanding of Marx's account of how capitalism arose out of feudalism.  Social change arises through the dialectical unfolding of relations between seven moments within the body politic of capitalism viewed as an ensemble or assemblage of activities and practices:

a) technological and organizational forms of production, exchange, and consumption

b) relations to nature

c) social relations between people

d) mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs

e) labor processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services, or affects

f) institutional, legal and governmental arrangements

g) the conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction.

Each one of these moments is internally dynamic and internally marked by tensions and contradictions (just think of mental conceptions of the world) but all of them are co-dependent and co-evolve in relation to each other.  The transition to capitalism entailed a mutually supporting movement across all seven moments.  New technologies could not be identified and practices without new mental conceptions of the world (including that of the relation to nature and social relations).  Social theorists have the habit of taking just one of these moments and viewing it as the "silver bullet" that causes all change.  We have technological determinists (Tom Friedman), environmental determinists (Jared Diamond), daily life determinists (Paul Hawken), labor process determinists (the autonomistas), institutionalists, and so on and so forth.  They are all wrong.  It is the dialectical motion across all of these moments that really counts even as there is uneven development in that motion.

When capitalism itself undergoes one of its phases of renewal, it does so precisely by co-evolving all moments, obviously not without tensions, struggles, fights, and contradictions.  But consider how these seven moments were configured around 1970 before the neoliberal surge and consider how they look now, and you will see they have all changed in ways that re-define the operative characteristics of capitalism viewed as a non-Hegelian totality.

An anti-capitalist political movement can start anywhere (in labor processes, around mental conceptions, in the relation to nature, in social relations, in the design of revolutionary technologies and organizational forms, out of daily life, or through attempts to reform institutional and administrative structures including the reconfiguration of state powers).  The trick is to keep the political movement moving from one moment to another in mutually reinforcing ways.  This was how capitalism arose out of feudalism and this is how something radically different called communism, socialism, or whatever must arise out of capitalism.  Previous attempts to create a communist or socialist alternative fatally failed to keep the dialectic between the different moments in motion and failed to embrace the unpredictabilities and uncertainties in the dialectical movement between them.  Capitalism has survived precisely by keeping the dialectical movement between the moments going and constructively embracing the inevitable tensions, including crises, that result.

Change arises, of course, out of an existing state of affairs and it has to harness the possibilities immanent within an existing situation.  Since the existing situation varies enormously from Nepal, to the Pacific regions of Bolivia, to the deindustrializing cities of Michigan and the still booming cities of Mumbai and Shanghai and the shaken but by no means destroyed financial centers of New York and London, so all manner of experiments in social change in different places and at different geographical scales are both likely and potentially illuminating as ways to make (or not make) another world possible.  And in each instance it may seem as if one or other aspect of the existing situation holds the key to a different political future.  But the first rule for a global anti-capitalist movement must be: never rely on the unfolding dynamics of one moment without carefully calibrating how relations with all the others are adapting and reverberating.

Feasible future possibilities arise out of the existing state of relations between the different moments.  Strategic political interventions within and across the spheres can gradually move the social order onto a different developmental path.  This is what wise leaders and forward-looking institutions do all the time in local situations, so there is no reason to think there is anything particularly fantastic or utopian about acting in this way.  The left has to look to build alliances between and across those working in the distinctive spheres.  An anti-capitalist movement has to be far broader than groups mobilizing around social relations or over questions of daily life in themselves.  Traditional hostilities between, for example, those with technical, scientific, and administrative expertise and those animating social movements on the ground have to be addressed and overcome.  We now have to hand, in the example of the climate change movement, a significant example of how such alliances can begin to work.

In this instance the relation to nature is the beginning point, but everyone realizes that something has to give on all the other moments, and while there is a wishful politics that wants to see the solution as purely technological, it becomes clearer by the day that daily life, mental conceptions, institutional arrangements, production processes, and social relations have to be involved.  And all of that means a movement to restructure capitalist society as a whole and to confront the growth logic that underlies the problem in the first place.

There have, however, to be some loosely agreed-upon common objectives in any transitional movement.  Some general guiding norms can be set down.  These might include (and I just float these norms here for discussion) respect for nature, radical egalitarianism in social relations, institutional arrangements based in some sense of common interests and common property, democratic administrative procedures (as opposed to the monetized shams that now exist), labor processes organized by the direct producers, daily life as the free exploration of new kinds of social relations and living arrangements, mental conceptions that focus on self-realization in service to others, and technological and organizational innovations oriented to the pursuit of the common good rather than to supporting militarized power, surveillance, and corporate greed.  These could be the co-revolutionary points around which social action could converge and rotate.  Of course this is utopian!  But so what!  We cannot afford not to be.

Let me detail one particular aspect of the problem which arises in the place where I work.  Ideas have consequences and false ideas can have devastating consequences.  Policy failures based on erroneous economic thinking played a crucial role in both the run-up to the debacle of the 1930s and in the seeming inability to find an adequate way out.  Though there is no agreement among historians and economists as to exactly what policies failed, it is agreed that the knowledge structure through which the crisis was understood needed to be revolutionized.  Keynes and his colleagues accomplished that task.  But by the mid-1970s, it became clear that the Keynesian policy tools were no longer working at least in the way they were being applied, and it was in this context that monetarism, supply-side theory, and the (beautiful) mathematical modeling of micro-economic market behaviors supplanted broad-brush macro-economic Keynesian thinking.  The monetarist and narrower neoliberal theoretical frame that dominated after 1980 is now in question.  In fact it has disastrously failed.

We need new mental conceptions to understand the world.  What might these be and who will produce them, given both the sociological and intellectual malaise that hangs over knowledge production and (equally important) dissemination more generally?  The deeply entrenched mental conceptions associated with neoliberal theories and the neoliberalization and corporatization of the universities and the media has played more than a trivial role in the production of the present crisis.  For example, the whole question of what to do about the financial system, the banking sector, the state-finance nexus, and the power of private property rights cannot be broached without going outside of the box of conventional thinking.  For this to happen will require a revolution in thinking, in places as diverse as the universities, the media, and government as well as within the financial institutions themselves.

Karl Marx, while not in any way inclined to embrace philosophical idealism, held that ideas are a material force in history.  Mental conceptions constitute, after all, one of the seven moments in his general theory of co-revolutionary change.  Autonomous developments and inner conflicts over what mental conceptions shall become hegemonic therefore have an important historical role to play.  It was for this reason that Marx (along with Engels) wrote The Communist Manifesto, Capital, and innumerable other works.  These works provide a systematic critique, albeit incomplete, of capitalism and its crisis tendencies.  But as Marx also insisted, it was only when these critical ideas carried over into the fields of institutional arrangements, organizational forms, production systems, daily life, social relations, technologies, and relations to nature that the world would truly change.

Since Marx's goal was to change the world and not merely to understand it, ideas had to be formulated with a certain revolutionary intent.  This inevitably meant a conflict with modes of thought more convivial to and useful for the ruling class.  The fact that Marx's oppositional ideas, particularly in recent years, have been the target of repeated repressions and exclusions (to say nothing of bowdlerizations and misrepresentations galore) suggests that his ideas may be too dangerous for the ruling classes to tolerate.  While Keynes repeatedly avowed that he had never read Marx, he was surrounded and influenced in the 1930s by many people (like his economist colleague Joan Robinson) who had.  While many of them objected vociferously to Marx's foundational concepts and his dialectical mode of reasoning, they were acutely aware of and deeply affected by some of his more prescient conclusions.  It is fair to say, I think, that the Keynesian theory revolution could not have been accomplished without the subversive presence of Marx lurking in the wings.

The trouble in these times is that most people have no idea who Keynes was and what he really stood for while the knowledge of Marx is negligible.  The repression of critical and radical currents of thought, or to be more exact the corralling of radicalism within the bounds of multiculturalism, identity politics, and cultural choice, creates a lamentable situation within the academy and beyond, no different in principle to having to ask the bankers who made the mess to clean it up with exactly the same tools as they used to get into it.  Broad adhesion to post-modern and post-structuralist ideas which celebrate the particular at the expense of big-picture thinking does not help.  To be sure, the local and the particular are vitally important and theories that cannot embrace, for example, geographical difference, are worse than useless.  But when that fact is used to exclude anything larger than parish politics then the betrayal of the intellectuals and abrogation of their traditional role become complete.

The current populations of academicians, intellectuals, and experts in the social sciences and humanities are by and large ill-equipped to undertake the collective task of revolutionizing our knowledge structures.  They have, in fact, been deeply implicated in the construction of the new systems of neoliberal governmentality that evade questions of legitimacy and democracy and foster a technocratic authoritarian politics.  Few seem predisposed to engage in self-critical reflection.  Universities continue to promote the same useless courses on neo-classical economic or rational choice political theory as if nothing has happened and the vaunted business schools simply add a course or two on business ethics or how to make money out of other people's bankruptcies.  After all, the crisis arose out of human greed and there is nothing that can be done about that!

The current knowledge structure is clearly dysfunctional and equally clearly illegitimate.  The only hope is that a new generation of perceptive students (in the broad sense of all those who seek to know the world) will clearly see it so and insist upon changing it.  This happened in the 1960s.  At various other critical points in history student-inspired movements, recognizing the disjunction between what is happening in the world and what they are being taught and fed by the media, were prepared to do something about it.  There are signs, from Tehran to Athens and onto many European university campuses of such a movement.  How the new generation of students in China will act must surely be of deep concern in the corridors of political power in Beijing.

A student-led and youthful revolutionary movement, with all of its evident uncertainties and problems, is a necessary but not sufficient condition to produce that revolution in mental conceptions that can lead us to a more rational solution to the current problems of endless growth.

What, more broadly, would happen if an anti-capitalist movement were constituted out of a broad alliance of the alienated, the discontented, the deprived, and the dispossessed?  The image of all such people everywhere rising up and demanding and achieving their proper place in economic, social, and political life is stirring indeed.  It also helps focus on the question of what it is they might demand and what it is that needs to be done.

Revolutionary transformations cannot be accomplished without at the very minimum changing our ideas, abandoning cherished beliefs and prejudices, giving up various daily comforts and rights, submitting to some new daily life regimen, changing our social and political roles, reassigning our rights, duties, and responsibilities, and altering our behaviors to better conform to collective needs and a common will.  The world around us -- our geographies -- must be radically re-shaped as must our social relations, the relation to nature, and all of the other moments in the co-revolutionary process.  It is understandable, to some degree, that many prefer a politics of denial to a politics of active confrontation with all of this.

It would also be comforting to think that all of this could be accomplished pacifically and voluntarily, that we would dispossess ourselves, strip ourselves bare, as it were, of all that we now possess that stands in the way of the creation of a more socially just, steady-state social order.  But it would be disingenuous to imagine that this could be so, that no active struggle will be involved, including some degree of violence.  Capitalism came into the world, as Marx once put it, bathed in blood and fire.  Although it might be possible to do a better job of getting out from under it than getting into it, the odds are heavily against any purely pacific passage to the promised land.

There are various broad fractious currents of thought on the left as to how to address the problems that now confront us.  There is, first of all, the usual sectarianism stemming from the history of radical action and the articulations of left political theory.  Curiously, the one place where amnesia is not so prevalent is within the left (the splits between anarchists and Marxists that occurred back in the 1870s, between Trotskyists, Maoists, and orthodox Communists, between the centralizers who want to command the state and the anti-statist autonomists and anarchists).  The arguments are so bitter and so fractious as to sometimes make one think that more amnesia might be a good thing.  But beyond these traditional revolutionary sects and political factions, the whole field of political action has undergone a radical transformation since the mid-1970s.  The terrain of political struggle and of political possibilities has shifted, both geographically and organizationally.

There are now vast numbers of non-governmental organizations (NGO's) that play a political role that was scarcely visible before the mid-1970s.  Funded by both state and private interests, populated often by idealist thinkers and organizers (they constitute a vast employment program), and for the most part dedicated to single-issue questions (environment, poverty, women's rights, anti-slavery and trafficking work, etc), they refrain from straight anti-capitalist politics even as they espouse progressive ideas and causes.  In some instances, however, they are actively neoliberal, engaging in privatization of state welfare functions or fostering institutional reforms to facilitate market integration of marginalized populations (microcredit and microfinance schemes for low-income populations are a classic example of this).

While there are many radical and dedicated practitioners in this NGO world, their work is at best ameliorative.  Collectively, they have a spotty record of progressive achievements, although in certain arenas, such as women's rights, health care, and environmental preservation, they can reasonably claim to have made major contributions to human betterment.  But revolutionary change by NGO is impossible.  They are too constrained by the political and policy stances of their donors.  So even though, in supporting local empowerment, they help open up spaces where anti-capitalist alternatives become possible and even support experimentation with such alternatives, they do nothing to prevent the re-absorption of these alternatives into the dominant capitalist practice: they even encourage it.  The collective power of NGOs in these times is reflected in the dominant role they play in the World Social Forum, where attempts to forge a global justice movement, a global alternative to neoliberalism, have been concentrated over the last ten years.

The second broad wing of opposition arises out of anarchist, autonomist, and grassroots organizations (GROs) which refuse outside funding even as some of them do rely upon some alternative institutional base (such as the Catholic Church with its "base community" initiatives in Latin America or broader church sponsorship of political mobilization in the inner cities of the United States).  This group is far from homogeneous (indeed there are bitter disputes among them pitting, for example, social anarchists against those they scathingly refer to as mere "lifestyle" anarchists).  There is, however, a common antipathy to negotiation with state power and an emphasis upon civil society as the sphere where change can be accomplished.  The self-organizing powers of people in the daily situations in which they live has to be the basis for any anti-capitalist alternative.  Horizontal networking is their preferred organizing model.  So-called "solidarity economies" based on bartering, collectives, and local production systems is their preferred political economic form.  They typically oppose the idea that any central direction might be necessary and reject hierarchical social relations or hierarchical political power structures along with conventional political parties.  Organizations of this sort can be found everywhere and in some places have achieved a high degree of political prominence.  Some of them are radically anti-capitalist in their stance and espouse revolutionary objectives and in some instances are prepared to advocate sabotage and other forms of disruption (shades of the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader Meinhof in Germany, and the Weather Underground in the United States in the 1970s).  But the effectiveness of all these movements (leaving aside their more violent fringes) is limited by their reluctance and inability to scale up their activism into large-scale organizational forms capable of confronting global problems.  The presumption that local action is the only meaningful level of change and that anything that smacks of hierarchy is anti-revolutionary is self-defeating when it comes to larger questions.  Yet these movements are unquestionably providing a widespread base for experimentation with anti-capitalist politics.

The third broad trend is given by the transformation that has been occurring in traditional labor organizing and left political parties, varying from social democratic traditions to more radical Trotskyist and Communist forms of political party organization.  This trend is not hostile to the conquest of state power or hierarchical forms of organization.  Indeed, it regards the latter as necessary to the integration of political organization across a variety of political scales.  In the years when social democracy was hegemonic in Europe and even influential in the United States, state control over the distribution of the surplus became a crucial tool to diminish inequalities.  The failure to take social control over the production of surpluses and thereby really challenge the power of the capitalist class was the Achilles heel of this political system, but we should not forget the advances that it made even if it is now clearly insufficient to go back to such a political model with its social welfarism and Keynesian economics.  The Bolivarian movement in Latin America and the ascent to state power of progressive social democratic governments is one of the most hopeful signs of a resuscitation of a new form of left statism.

Both organized labor and left political parties have taken some hard hits in the advanced capitalist world over the last thirty years.  Both have either been convinced or coerced into broad support for neoliberalization, albeit with a somewhat more human face.  One way to look upon neoliberalism, as was earlier noted, is as a grand and quite revolutionary movement (led by that self-proclaimed revolutionary figure, Margaret Thatcher) to privatize the surpluses or at least prevent their further socialization.

While there are some signs of recovery of both labor organizing and left politics (as opposed to the "third way" celebrated by New Labor in Britain under Tony Blair and disastrously copied by many social democratic parties in Europe) along with signs of the emergence of more radical political parties in different parts of the world, the exclusive reliance upon a vanguard of workers is now in question as is the ability of those leftist parties that gain some access to political power to have a substantive impact upon the development of capitalism and to cope with the troubled dynamics of crisis-prone accumulation.  The performance of the German Green Party in power has hardly been stellar relative to their political stance out of power and social democratic parties have lost their way entirely as a true political force.  But left political parties and labor unions are significant still, and their takeover of aspects of state power, as with the Workers' Party in Brazil or the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela, has had a clear impact on left thinking, not only in Latin America.  The complicated problem of how to interpret the role of the Communist Party in China, with its exclusive control over political power, and what its future policies might be about is not easily resolved either.

The co-revolutionary theory earlier laid out would suggest that there is no way that an anti-capitalist social order can be constructed without seizing state power, radically transforming it, and re-working the constitutional and institutional framework that currently supports private property, the market system, and endless capital accumulation.  Inter-state competition and geoeconomic and geopolitical struggles over everything from trade and money to questions of hegemony are also far too significant to be left to local social movements or cast aside as too big to contemplate.  How the architecture of the state-finance nexus is to be re-worked along with the pressing question of the common measure of value given by money cannot be ignored in the quest to construct alternatives to capitalist political economy.  To ignore the state and the dynamics of the inter-state system is therefore a ridiculous idea for any anti-capitalist revolutionary movement to accept.

The fourth broad trend is constituted by all the social movements that are not so much guided by any particular political philosophy or leanings but by the pragmatic need to resist displacement and dispossession (through gentrification, industrial development, dam construction, water privatization, the dismantling of social services and public educational opportunities, or whatever).  In this instance the focus on daily life in the city, town, village, or wherever provides a material base for political organizing against the threats that state policies and capitalist interests invariably pose to vulnerable populations.  These forms of protest politics are massive.

Again, there is a vast array of social movements of this sort, some of which can become radicalized over time as they more and more realize that the problems are systemic rather than particular and local.  The bringing together of such social movements into alliances on the land (like the Via Campesina, the landless peasant movement in Brazil, or peasants mobilizing against land and resource grabs by capitalist corporations in India) or in urban contexts (the right to the city and take back the land movements in Brazil and now the United States) suggests the way may be open to create broader alliances to discuss and confront the systemic forces that underpin the particularities of gentrification, dam construction, privatization, or whatever.  More pragmatic rather than driven by ideological preconceptions, these movements nevertheless can arrive at systemic understandings out of their own experience.  To the degree that many of them exist in the same space, such as within the metropolis, they can (as supposedly happened with the factory workers in the early stages of the industrial revolution) make common cause and begin to forge, on the basis of their own experience, a consciousness of how capitalism works and what it is that might collectively be done.  This is the terrain where the figure of the "organic intellectual" leader, made so much of in Antonio Gramsci's work, the autodidact who comes to understand the world firsthand through bitter experiences but shapes his or her understanding of capitalism more generally, has a great deal to say.  To listen to peasant leaders of the MST in Brazil or the leaders of the anti-corporate land grab movement in India is a privileged education.  In this instance the task of the educated alienated and discontented is to magnify the subaltern voice so that attention can be paid to the circumstances of exploitation and repression and the answers that can be shaped into an anti-capitalist program.

The fifth epicenter for social change lies with the emancipatory movements around questions of identity -- women, children, gays, racial, ethnic, and religious minorities all demand an equal place in the sun -- along with the vast array of environmental movements that are not explicitly anti-capitalist.  The movements claiming emancipation on each of these issues are geographically uneven and often geographically divided in terms of needs and aspirations.  But global conferences on women's rights (Nairobi in 1985 that led to the Beijing declaration of 1995) and anti-racism (the far more contentious conference in Durban in 2001) are attempting to find common ground, as is true also of the environmental conferences, and there is no question that social relations are changing along all of these dimensions at least in some parts of the world.  When cast in narrow essentialist terms, these movements can appear to be antagonistic to class struggle.  Certainly within much of the academy they have taken priority of place at the expense of class analysis and political economy.  But the feminization of the global labor force, the feminization of poverty almost everywhere, and the use of gender disparities as a means of labor control make the emancipation and eventual liberation of women from their repressions a necessary condition for class struggle to sharpen its focus.  The same observation applies to all the other identity forms where discrimination or outright repression can be found.  Racism and the oppression of women and children were foundational in the rise of capitalism.  But capitalism as currently constituted can in principle survive without these forms of discrimination and oppression, though its political ability to do so will be severely curtailed if not mortally wounded in the face of a more unified class force.  The modest embrace of multiculturalism and women's rights within the corporate world, particularly in the United States, provides some evidence of capitalism's accommodation to these dimensions of social change (including the environment), even as it re-emphasizes the salience of class divisions as the principle dimension for political action.

These five broad tendencies are not mutually exclusive or exhaustive of organizational templates for political action.  Some organizations neatly combine aspects of all five tendencies.  But there is a lot of work to be done to coalesce these various tendencies around the underlying question: can the world change materially, socially, mentally, and politically in such a way as to confront not only the dire state of social and natural relations in so many parts of the world, but also the perpetuation of endless compound growth?  This is the question that the alienated and discontented must insist upon asking, again and again, even as they learn from those who experience the pain directly and who are so adept at organizing resistances to the dire consequences of compound growth on the ground.

Communists, Marx and Engels averred in their original conception laid out in The Communist Manifesto, have no political party.  They simply constitute themselves at all times and in all places as those who understand the limits, failings, and destructive tendencies of the capitalist order as well as the innumerable ideological masks and false legitimations that capitalists and their apologists (particularly in the media) produce in order to perpetuate their singular class power.  Communists are all those who work incessantly to produce a different future to that which capitalism portends.  This is an interesting definition.  While traditional institutionalized communism is as good as dead and buried, there are by this definition millions of de facto communists active among us, willing to act upon their understandings, ready to creatively pursue anti-capitalist imperatives.  If, as the alternative globalization movement of the late 1990s declared, 'another world is possible' then why not also say 'another communism is possible'?  The current circumstances of capitalist development demand something of this sort, if fundamental change is to be achieved.

These notes draw heavily on my forthcoming book, The Enigma of Capital, to be published by Profile Books in April 2010.

David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the City University of New York.  This article was first published by Seminário dez anos depois on 10 December 2009; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.

Source: MRZine