Offering illuminating insight into the investigative journalism behind Naomi Klein's bestselling book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, this riveting hour-long lecture and interview explains the ideas and research behind the book that exposed the popular myth of the free market economy’s peaceful global victory. From Chile in 1973 to today, this is the chilling tale of shock doctors, those powerful few making a killing around the world by cashing in on chaos and exploiting bloodshed and catastrophe to brutally implement their policies.
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End:Civ Resist Or Die (2010) - Documentary Film - END:CIV examines our culture’s addiction to systematic violence and environmental exploitation, and probes the resulting epidemic of poisoned landscapes and shell-shocked nations. Based in part on Endgame, the best-selling book by Derrick Jensen, END:CIV asks: “If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?”
Philosopher and Critical theorist Slavoj Zizek, says he’s not an optimist when it comes to Europe and the broad political and ideological struggle in the continent and the world. But he salutes the demonstration of the British workers last Saturday (26 March 2011) and the awackening “of some kind of authentic left” as the only hope in defense of the European values. Greek Left Review met Slavoj Zizek and prof. Costas Douzinas at Birkbeck college in the center of London on Saturday morning. While according to the Guardian 400.000 workers were marching towards Hyde Park, Slavoj Zizek emphasized that social mobilization and the emergence of European solidarity amorng workers is the only way to break out of the vicious cycle that neoliberal technocrats and religious fundamentalists are driving the continent.
GLR: Today we’re witnessing in Britain the largest march since the Iraqi war. After a year of unrest in many European countries an image of possible solidarity appears. Is there anything to be gained by European solidarity and is this solidarity even possible? What is the European project about today?
SZ. Το paraphrase this quote from May 68: It’s not possible, but it’s necessary. If by saying Europe we mean what is worth fighting for like egalitarian legacy, the idea of solidarity, welfare state and so on, then, maybe it’s the only thing that can give us, some hope. Europe, not only, cannot realize its project but it cannot even see what this project is. What makes me happy in this protest today is that it gives me the pleasure to correct my previous analysis which was that today in Europe you only have two choices: On the one hand the pro-capitalist liberal parties which can at the same time be progressive in issues like human rights, abortion and so on and on the other – the only moment of true passionate politics – right-wing anti-immigrant formations. My claim is that this would be a dead end if these were the only choices. It’s a great hope for Europe that some kind of radical or authentic left is awakening.
GLR While Europe is reviving and rediscovering radicalism we have revolts all over the Middle East. How can we link this huge insurrection and revolution wave in Africa to what is happening in Europe?
SZ. Obviously the “standard”, what we call the neoliberal ideological model is coming to a crisis. For me these two are kind of supplementary phenomena. Capitalism is coming into crisis in Europe, but not only. What happened in Egypt was both authentically democratic but also a call for economic justice. Yet, what I find extremely interesting is that the Egyptians and other Africans are demonstrating something much more important. Although, our official dream in the west was the silent presupposition of the western democracy, we secretly did not really want others to become like us. Until now the standard racist reaction of western Europeans was that, we would love Arabs to become democratic, but hey… they are primitive. The only way you can arouse the crowds there is either by religious fundamentalism, or anti-Semitic nationalism. So, now we get exactly what we wished for: A secular uprising, that in some cases even lifts religious divisions (Copts and Muslims are praying together in Egypt). But the result for us, is anxiety, instead of joy. “Where is this going to lead”? Not only we have a proof that all the distrust to the Arab democratic potential is false, but what is more important is that it proves that democracy is universal, it’s not our own. We desperately try to read out of the events that they want, what we want. These events are authentically democratic but they are also a call for economic justice.
Now, we need to rethink even old events, like the Khomeini revolution in Iran. It’s now clear that the Khomeini revolution was not simply a fundamentalist takeover. We should remember that for over one year and a half there was a hard internal struggle, which allowed the fundamentalist clerics to take over. The Khomeini revolution was also an emancipatrory explosion, which is now returning through the green movement and Musavi. This is the most precious lesson: We need to break out of this cycle where our choices are either pro-western liberals or religious fundamentalism and here we come to the crucial point. Why do we focus on Libya now? Because it allows the re-normalization of the crisis. It fits in our standard western clichés. Qaddafi is a crazy leader, one of the axes of terror and so on. Here we know where we stand. We can translate this to the old anti-fundamentalism struggle and therefore the media can pass silent through what is happening at the same time in Bahrain where Saudi army is directly intervening into another country in order to crash the same as in Egypt democratic struggle. Where is Obama in this case, where are the western leaders? My only hope is that this procedure will go to the end. And the name of the end is clear. Saudi Arabia.
CD. I should probably add that this idea of re-normalization has also another part and that is that Libya gave the western powers the ability to go back to this idea of the nineties of humanitarian interventions, which had declined due to the catastrophes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, what Sarkozy, Cameron and a little less maybe Obama, tell us is that we’re there to save civilians. That kind of cosmopolitan rhetoric can now reorganize or re structure the ideological field around the image of the west as a humanitarian power.
GLR. But the popular movement is facing its limits when bombs are falling and people die. How should we address this problem?
SZ. In Libya the situation is objectively mixed. I don’t think we have a clear-cut case. I have no sympathy for Qaddafi, but nonetheless I don’t think that what is happening in Libya is the same as in Egypt or elsewhere. We cannot say it’s simply and only about a bad tyrant opposed by the people. There are all sorts of tensions there like tribal relations and this is why the west loves it. The west liked that same phenomenon in the ex Yugoslavia as well. It was not politics, but tribes fighting each other. The only thing we can do, is simply ignore, side step Libya. For me what is going on now in Egypt is much more important. As I always emphasize, they are beautiful – we all cry. But these enthusiastic moments are in a way cheap.. What will happen now? How will this spirit of the revolution be institutionalized?
CD. We’re moving from constituents to constitutive powers
SZ. It would be very sad if Egypt only becomes a slightly more pro western, pro liberal capitalist society. It’s important to see now how trade unions are formed, how students organize themselves and so on. The true battle is going on now. And in regards to the whole area I find crucial what is happening to Saudi Arabia and the rich Emirates. It’s where you get the western hypocrisy and contradiction at its absolutely purest – the obvious paradox. US are worried about human rights and proclaiming Iran as the evil. I’m sorry but if you’re worried about women’s rights in the Middle East, Iran is a paradise compared to Saudi Arabia. Even Ahmadinejad named one or two feminine ministers. Friends told me that men are idiots there. If you go to a ministry even if the minister is a man you have to work with a woman in order to get your job done. In all of the emirates you have a neo-serfdom if not slavery with so many poor immigrant workers from Philippines… I think it’s crucial to bring these developments in front and sharpen the contradictions.
GLR. A theoretical question: There were articles in the leftist greek newspapers and websites endorsing the idea that anyone who is lacanian cannot support the idea of the revolution on the basis of this famous discussion of Lacan with the students of May 1968. Is a Lacanian position necessarily non-revolutionary? Can there even be a revolutionary policy in the Lacanian field?
I will not say the opposite. It is definitely not necessarily revolutionary. Here’s what I was claiming: In the confusion of today’s ideological contradictions, how does it happen and in our permissive societies we get to have more regulations and anxiety? We get sexual freedom, which means that half of us are impotent and frigid and so on. To even understand this you need something like the Lacanian theory. Off course I violently disagree with that statement if you read it like a kind of liberal wisdom (you wanted to play with the revolution so you’re going to get another master). I don’t read Lacan as a limitation, part of this nouvelle philosophie anticommuniste (which suggests that gulag follows the revolution). But nonetheless, this was the problem of 20th century communist revolutions.
There is a moment of truth for us. What will come after, how do we effectively avoid a new terror? I think the question is totally legitimate. What I’m saying is something more. Lacan is clearly inconsistent, often with himself. The big question today -and the left stilldoesn’t have a good answer – is what goes on ideologically. I think you cannot understand all the paradoxes today without psychoanalysis. Are we aware in what strange societies we live? I always love to mention this example. In the previous UK elections there was a show in BBC, on who was the most hated politician and Tony Blair came first. One week later he won the elections. This worries me. There’s a level of social frustration, which is simply not captured by simply parliamentary vote. I’m not against democracy. In the socialist times we liked to say “don’t bullshit me with ideals. Look at how socialism really is”. Let’s be honest and do the same today. Let’s see really what parliamentary democracy captures and what not. Precisely if you like democracy and you’re passionately attached to it you should worry about it. Does it function effectively? Does it capture the social discontent? We should search for solutions. See what’s happening in Latin America. In some cases the solution they give is to combine representative democracy (the model of Lula or Morales) with social movements. Isn’t it obvious that democracy is turning more and more to an empty ritual? If we even vote, we don’t know what we vote for. Look at NAFTA, one of the crucial economic agreements. Nobody was asked. Even in the congress they were more or less blackmailed to do it, nobody read the 5000 pages of the agreement. You in Greece are in the same position. Specialists are giving you their special opinion in a way you cannot judge. “Sorry people, these are the facts”. Up to a point they’re true – they’re not simply lying. If you are into the current system, it’s true. But it’s time to start questioning: Is the system our ultimate horizon? And then, even these experts, often cheat. Are they really honest?
I remember the late 90’s and the big economic crisis in south East Asia. These greater liberal economists here attacked Mahathir Mohamed because he suggested the Malaysian government to take over of all the bank transactions in the country. It worked triumphantly. Even in the existing space, the rules are not fixed in the way neo-liberal ideologists are trying to convince us. By the same time, Schroeder sacked Lafontaine who wanted to do the same in Germany. Forget about this idea -that even Toni Negri buys too much- of the disappearing state and the appearance of the global empire. The state is more and more important.
GLR. Are we watching the insistence of Neoliberals to impose an end to history?
SZ. It’s a bit more complicated than this. It’s easy to make fun of Fukuyama about the end of history. But I would argue that 90% of today’s leftists are effectively Fukuyamaists. Or, maybe, at least until a couple of years ago. They don’t ask the big questions. The alternate models are not clear. Even the most radical rhetoric in Porto Allegre or Seattle is basically moralistic. Is there a positive model? It’s very easy to play the card of local movements and local self-organization. This is not the model. I don’t believe in this Negrian dream that the multitude will somehow take over. We have to accept the need of some kind of regulatory apparatuses. Not only the standard dreams of social democracy and state socialism but even this dream of soviet councils, immediate local democracy has also reach its limits.
GLR How will we organize resistance in a bigger scale? And how would you characterize what the guardian calls the freedom flue?
SZ. I’m not a pessimist but I don’t think we know as much as we think we know. I don’t think we have what Frederick Jameson would have called cognitive mapping. Some leftists think we know what is going on today with new capitalism and neoliberals, we just don’t know how to mobilize people. I think we don’t even really know what is going on. In the short term I’m not an optimist. I cannot give you a recipe on what to do. All I know and on this I stand is that we will be pushed to do something, if not we will approach a new authoritarian society. This is the moment when utopias emerge. You invent utopias when you’re in deep shit and cannot do otherwise. You especially in Greece are pushed now to find ideas for popular control, the functioning of state and so on. The way they try now in Bolivia. This is my almost tragic position. I agree with you but I don’t take it as an argument to justify that therefore we should continue to live the way we do now. If we do that, I wouldn’t like to live in such a society. I think we have clear signs that we are approaching some kind of new liberal capitalism with new forms of apartheid where private freedoms will remain. You will be able to individually express any way you want but social mobilization will be less and less. We can no longer have this old Marxist confidence that we know where history is going. History is going into an abyss.
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).
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.
End:Civ Resist Or Die (2010) - Documentary Film - END:CIV examines our culture’s addiction to systematic violence and environmental exploitation, and probes the resulting epidemic of poisoned landscapes and shell-shocked nations. Based in part on Endgame, the best-selling book by Derrick Jensen, END:CIV asks: “If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air, and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?”
