[Debate] Part 2: Re: (Fwd) David Harvey on May Day

[Patrick Bond]

  Part 2: David Harvey on Rebel Cities, Occupy Wall Street, and the
  Benefits of Class Struggle


In part two of our interview with social theorist David Harvey, he notes 
the "urban center" of Occupy Wall Street has been key to its success. 
"We have a global plutocracy now, which essentially rules the world," 
Harvey says. "The only way you can challenge that power is by the mass 
movements." He also discusses Karl Marx, the lack of evidence that 
austerity stimulates economic growth, and how many of the social 
benefits that exist today were brought about through class struggle. 
Harvey's most recent book is /Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City 
to the Urban Revolution/.

*AMY GOODMAN:* We're joined by leading social theorist, David Harvey, 
distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of City 
University of New York. His most recent book is called /Rebel Cities: 
 From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution/.

Do you think the Occupy movement, the Occupy Wall Street movement, is an 
urban revolution, Professor Harvey?

*DAVID HARVEY:* I think that it's using the city as a site---you know, 
some of it is also going on in the countryside, but it's using the city 
as a site to try to mobilize people. And what we see, what was, in a 
sense, a common feature between, say, Tahrir Square and Madison, was the 
taking of a central space and the utilization of that central space to 
organize political expression. And this has a long, long history. And 
when that happens, things tend to change. And so, I think that the urban 
center of a lot of the Occupy Wall Street is actually a very, very 
significant piece of the puzzle.

*AMY GOODMAN:* It's very interesting that this movement has emerged, 
sort of exploded on the scene, under President Obama---not under 
President Bush, but under President Obama.

*DAVID HARVEY:* Well, I'm sorry to say, but I think most people are 
beginning to see that the party of Wall Street, as I call it, dominates 
both the Republican and the Democratic parties. So no matter what 
President Obama wanted to do, he was still faced with a Democratic party 
that was not willing to really go against the big financial interests. 
And so, what we see is a kind of corruption of politics by big money 
power. I mean, I think it was Mark Twain who kind of said, you know, 
Congress is the best Congress that money can buy. And it's really become 
absolutely, I think, the case, given all the recent Supreme Court 
decisions that money now dominates conventional politics. So both 
political parties are actually caught up in this money-raising game. And 
so, I think the Occupy Wall Street just kind of say, we've got to stop 
that, and we have to find a different mode of political expression to 
that which is set up through all of the super PACs and all the rest of 
it. And the only mode of expression that exists for low-income 
populations, given they don't have money power, is of course to be on 
the street.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Earlier this year, we spoke with Paul Mason 
<http://www.democracynow.org/2012/2/22/as_greece_erupts_bbcs_paul_mason>, who's 
the economics editor of /BBC Newsnight/. His latest book is called /Why 
It's Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions/. And I asked 
him why Greeks themselves are falling through the social safety net, why 
many no longer have access to healthcare. This is what he said about the 
Greek healthcare system.

    *PAUL MASON:* You pay a little bit into the healthcare, and you pay
    a bit for your medicines, and you pay a little bit for your
    treatment. But what's happened is, of course, the solutions imposed
    on Greece by the IMF and the European Union have involved raising
    taxes very dramatically. So they had an austerity tax that they
    collected through the electricity bill. Somebody showed me their
    electricity bill: 350 euros per month. Per month. So, what is that
    in dollars? Four hundred? But most of that is tax. And if you don't
    pay it, your electricity stops. Now, this person earned 500 euros
    per month. So, the money you have to pay for your healthcare, it's
    just no---well, it's food first, then healthcare, and so people just
    can't afford it.

*AMY GOODMAN:* That was BBC's Paul Mason. Your response to this, 
Professor Harvey?

*DAVID HARVEY:* Well, this has been going on for the last 30 years. It's 
what I kind of call the neoliberal counterrevolution, began in the 
1970s, which is to have the state increasingly withdraw from any forms 
of social provision, and also, of course, have the state less and less 
responsible for environmental degradation. So there's been a political 
movement of that sort, which began under Reagan and continued, even 
under Clinton, right the way through to the present situation, where you 
have a Republican party that is essentially saying, "Get rid of all of 
these supports." And this is going on in Europe, with Cameron in 
Britain. I mean, it's interesting to me. I mean, Reagan is long gone, 
and Thatcher is long gone, but Reaganism is still here. They've doubled 
down on Reaganism, and they've doubled down on Thatcherism.

And I think the time is ripe for a counterrevolution to that revolution, 
which is to say, we have to actually get a society in which people's 
healthcare is taken care of, the education is no longer privatized and 
is public and free, and come up with a kind of a different kind of 
social order to the one which is now constructed, which is purely 
constructed around the benefit of that 1 percent that earns, in this 
city, $3.57 million a year. And I point out that they earn in one day 
what 100,000 people are trying to live on in one year. And how does 
somebody who's trying to live $10,000 a year actually have money for 
healthcare, have money to send their kids to college? How can you 
possibly do that? So, this is the situation in which the 99 percent 
have, I think, to mobilize a big protest. But since they have no 
political power, since they don't have the money, like I say, you have 
to take back the streets. That's the only way you can do it.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Fox is the leading cable channel on the so-called news 
networks. Recently, Bill O'Reilly slammed President Obama's policies on 
poverty. This is a part of what he said.

    *BILL O'REILLY:* In a free society, people have a right to be a
    moron, and no government can stop irresponsible parenting. So, what
    is the solution? President Obama believes that the federal
    government should give money to the poor, hand it right to them, in
    a variety of ways. Problem with that is that many of the poor will
    use the money irresponsibly. The high rate of alcohol and drug
    addiction and other social problems assure a massive amount of waste
    in the entitlement arena. Americans are the most generous people on
    earth, but the truth is that income redistribution doesn't work. For
    what this Feds spend now on entitlements, every single poor person
    in America could be handed almost $21,000 a year.

*AMY GOODMAN:* That's Bill O'Reilly on Fox. Professor David Harvey?

*DAVID HARVEY:* Between 1945 and 1982, the top tax rate in this country 
never fell below much below 70 percent. Reagan reduced it to 30 percent, 
and of course we keep on seeing it being reduced and reduced and 
reduced. Economic growth, 1945 to 1982, was twice the rate of economic 
growth since. So this idea that, somehow or other, redistribution of 
income to low-income populations is inconsistent with economic growth is 
totally false. There is no evidence for it whatsoever. The only evidence 
that exists is that since 1972 we've seen an immense increase in the 
inequalities of income. That's what we've been in. That's what Reaganism 
has been about.

And by the way, I'd like to mention something about this, that Reagan 
went to war, you know, launched into an arms race, cut tax rates for the 
rich, ran up the deficit. Cheney later on would kind of say, "Reaganism 
taught us that deficits do not matter." And then when the deficit was 
high enough and the debt was high enough, they turned around and said, 
"We've got to cut all the social programs." What did Bush Jr. do? He 
fought two unfounded wars, he cut the tax rates for the rich, and he 
gave a big deal to Big Pharma, and they ran up the debt. And now they 
say, "We've got to cut all the social programs, and we've got to cut 
also sort of environmental protections." So, there's a game being played 
here, and it's been played consistently since the early 1980s. And that 
game is about trying to actually create a world in which the rich have 
all of the power, with immense concentrations. It's not only going on in 
the United States; it's going on globally. I mean, we have a global 
plutocracy now, which essentially rules the world.

And like I say, the only way you can challenge that power is by the mass 
movements, which are occurring all over the place. So we've seen mass 
movements in Bolivia. We've seen mass movements in Chile. We've seen 
mass movements in the Middle East. We've seen mass movements emerging 
throughout Europe and beginning to see them here. This is the only way 
we can change it.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Spain now---

*DAVID HARVEY:* Spain---

*AMY GOODMAN:* ---going into a deep recession.

*DAVID HARVEY:* Absolutely. Well, that's, again, austerity. There's no 
evidence that austerity actually stimulates growth. What you see is 
Britain is going back into a double recession. Spain has gone back in a 
double recession. Ireland, which has---was vicious in its austerity, is 
now in recession. The only part of the world that's been growing 
is---are, of course, places like Argentina, which have been using 
exactly what Bill O'Reilly talks about, which is redistributing income 
to low-income populations. And they've been growing at 8 percent.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Argentina, which refused to pay its IMF loan---

*DAVID HARVEY:* Pay its debt, and---

*AMY GOODMAN:* Pay its debt, overall.

*DAVID HARVEY:* Yeah, it basically defaulted on its debt. And, of 
course, everybody said to Argentina, "If you default on your debt, 
nobody will invest in you again." But surplus capital has to go 
somewhere, and Argentina is potentially a very rich country, so a couple 
of years after defaulting on the debt, suddenly money starts to pour 
back into Argentina.

*AMY GOODMAN:* I want to go back to the idea of rebel cities, speaking 
to Stephen Graham 
<http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/16/police_crackdowns_on_occupy_protests_from>, 
who wrote /Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism/, talking about 
how so-called undesirable people have been cleared out of urban spaces.

    *STEPHEN GRAHAM:* And cities in the last 20 or 30 years,
    particularly in North America, have become much more sanitized, much
    more controlled by questions of zero tolerance, by questions of
    really aggressive policing, to clear out those that are deemed to be
    sort of not fitting a model of urban life, which centers on
    consumption, which centers on business. So there's been a really
    powerful shift in cities to sort of criminalize homelessness, to
    criminalize panhandlers, to criminalize those not seen to belong in
    this---what Neil Smith in New York has called the "revanchist city,"
    the city taking back spaces for the wealthy, effectively.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Professor David Harvey?

*DAVID HARVEY:* Again, this has been going on a long time. You expel 
populations. You do it in a variety of ways. I mean, one of the ways, of 
course, is just simply raising rents, so the costs become so high that 
people cannot live here. So there's an out-migration of low-income 
populations from New York City, for example, because they can't afford 
to live here anymore. So they go out into small towns in Pennsylvania or 
upper New York state. They're just forced out by cost of living 
concerns. I mean, that's one of the big ways. And then, of course, 
there's planned gentrification, and then there's redevelopment. So, you 
know, NYU will redevelop some area and use eminent domain for private 
purposes. And again, eminent domain was meant for public purposes, but 
public---eminent domain is being used to expel populations. Columbia 
University is doing the same sort of thing. So you gentrify the whole 
city, so that Manhattan has now become, if you like, one vast gated 
community for the rich. And hardly surprisingly, you know, most 
low-income populations cannot afford to live here, so they're living 
way, way out in the suburbs.

And I came into Kennedy Airport the other day at 6:00 in the morning. I 
got on the A train, and the A train from Jamaica was absolutely packed. 
And it was packed with mainly women, mainly women of color, obviously 
exhausted, coming in at 6:30 in the morning to try to wake the city up 
so the suits could come in at 9:00 and their coffee was ready and 
everything was good. Now those are the people who are trying to live on 
$30,000 a year, and they have to live way, way out in Jamaica. They 
cannot live close to their place of work at all. And, of course, the 
transport cost is also a significant burden on their lives. And so, this 
is the kind of city which we've been creating in New York. And when I 
talk about the right to the city, I think about the rights of those 
people on the A train at 6:30 in the morning to create a different kind 
of city where they could live close to work, where they could actually 
do the things they need to do to have a decent life for themselves and 
their kids.

*AMY GOODMAN:* You have been teaching Karl Marx's /Kapital/, /Capital/, 
for a very long time.

*DAVID HARVEY:* Yeah.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Explain who Karl Marx was and why you think it's 
important to read this book.

*DAVID HARVEY:* He's a really---a really, really intelligent, smart guy, 
begin with that, and incredibly learned, one of the most learned people 
I've ever read. I mean, he knew Greek philosophy, and, you know, he's 
just---just amazingly erudite. But he's also a revolutionary thinker, 
and he has a very, very strong, critical eye on how capitalism works. 
And I was not born to admire Karl Marx. I was just troubled by the fact 
that none of the social theories I was working with in the 1960s and 
1970s seemed to work. And I started reading Marx, and I was thinking, 
"Oh, here, this works. Yeah, this is what's happening." So he has a 
fantastic, I think, insight into how capital works.

And it's---and actually, it's become even more relevant now, 
particularly since the neoliberal surge since the 1970s, when we've been 
told that the market has to settle everything, the market has to---you 
know, has to be. So, reading him, he's talking about the logic of what 
happens in a free market society. And one of the propositions he says, 
the closer you get to a purely free market society, the greater the 
wealth becomes of the very upper classes, and the lower---the worse the 
standard of living of the lower classes. And, of course, over the last 
30 years, that's exactly what's happened.

*AMY GOODMAN:* And why is that true?

*DAVID HARVEY:* Well, what he does---I guess the only way I can---best 
way I can explain it is, one of the principles he really enunciates: 
there's nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals. The 
egalitarian principle of the market is very important, but equality, 
when it---put in a situation where you have people with different 
endowments, actually allows more and more wealth to go up, trickle up to 
the affluent classes. I mean, it's a wonderful examination of how that 
principle works.

*AMY GOODMAN:* And so, continue on that thought, why you think it's so 
relevant. How did he end up writing this book?

*DAVID HARVEY:* He had the idea---well, one of the things he saw was 
that there were a group of people around who had been writing since the 
17th century onwards trying to explain what was going on under 
capitalism. And so, the field of political economy was being---you know, 
was being developed, people like Adam Smith and Ricardo and many other 
figures. So what I think he saw was that they were genuinely concerned 
to explain what was going on, but they missed some things. So he decided 
he wanted to, if you like, critique their political economy and to, out 
of that critique, develop and alternative understanding of how 
capitalism works. So his raw materials, if you like, are all the 
writings of the political economists from the 16th century onwards. And 
then what he does is to sort of create this alternative logic of---so 
you see how the system works.

And there's some wonderful stuff in there also about the craziness of 
finance, so if you want to understand finance capital, you can go to the 
stuff in volume three, which is---he talks about the financiers of the 
time. He said, "They have the charming character of swindler and prophet."

And so, he really appreciates what capitalism is about. And he 
appreciates strengths. I mean, he admires in many ways what it's done, 
but then kind of says, "But I can see the social costs of this," to 
which we would now add the environmental costs of this. And if we're not 
willing to pay those social costs and those environmental costs, then we 
have to invent some alternative system. What Marx was not very good at 
was defining what the alternative system would look like. So when Marx 
gets attacked, it's always because he invented something called 
communism, which he never did, and that failed. So he never really 
clearly defined what the alternative would look like. He gives some 
ideas about it. But what he did do also was to suggest that if there's 
going to be a change, it has to be some sort of change out of the 
present situation, so that we don't imagine something. So he was 
anti-utopian. He's saying, "Look, we have to take what is going on right 
now and use what is going on right now to try to create some alternative."

*AMY GOODMAN:* Finally, in Europe---unlike Europe, here in this country, 
"socialism," let alone "Marxism," is a dirty word.

*DAVID HARVEY:* Yes.

*AMY GOODMAN:* How did that happen? How did that come to be? I mean, 
we're about to go into May Day, into May 1st. Some are calling for a 
general strike.

*DAVID HARVEY:* Yes, right, right.

*AMY GOODMAN:* People talk---and those who say, "Just let the free 
market work." What organized labor brought us---for example, the 
eight-hour day---

*DAVID HARVEY:* Yes.

*AMY GOODMAN:* Forty-hour work week.

*DAVID HARVEY:* Well, many of the good things we have and which we rely 
on crucially were actually brought through the processes of class 
struggle, where labor got together and really started to force 
governments to act. So, Social Security, Medicare, all of those things, 
which, you know, the Republicans are trying to destroy, but they have a 
very hard time, because most of the people see them as being crucial to 
their lives, they came about because of the labor movement. And to some 
degree, they came about, I think, after 1945, for example, in this 
country. Some reform---it was very anti-communist in one level, but on 
another level, they had to move to respond to the rise of the Soviet 
Union and the rise of an alternative, so you get a reformist kind of 
capitalism that is, to some degree, fairer, to a certain level, relative 
to what it was in the 19---what it was in the 1930s. So, we would not 
have the standard of living we have right now, had it not been for 
organized labor and its allies actually changing the political agenda.

Their power to affect the political agenda has been severely curtailed 
since the 1970s, 1980s onwards, by all these transformations in what's 
going on. And the result is, we now need an alternative power source, 
because most of the labor now is precarious, it's temporary, it's 
itinerant and so on. And that's why I say organizing cities is a 
good---is a way to start to think about it. If everybody who's involved 
in producing and reproducing urban life got together and said, "We want 
to define a different kind of urban life and a different standard of 
living for the mass of the population," we would have a very different 
politics. And we need that politics desperately right now to get away 
from all of this free market kind of ideology and all that it does, 
which is make the rich richer and poor poorer.

GUEST

*David Harvey <http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/david_harvey>*, 
distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the 
City University of New York. His most recent book is /Rebel Cities: From 
the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution/.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.fahamu.org/pipermail/debate-list/attachments/20120507/98af4ad3/attachment-0001.htm