[Debate] (Fwd) David Harvey on urban spatial tactics, humanism, politics and intellectual challenges

[Patrick Bond]

(A sober reminder of the armchair-academic positioning some of us have 
to pander to: "The defense of Marx was very much located in the academy. 
And in the academy you have to show your paces, and there is a certain 
pressure to sound deeply intelligent. Therefore keeping Marx Studies 
alive --- if you want to call it that --- became very academist and 
affected by these sorts of things. But I think it did keep it alive. So 
the obscurantism came out of that and I understand it historically very 
much in those terms.")

http://www.full-stop.net/2012/05/01/interviews/michael-schapira-and-david-backer/david-harvey/


    David Harvey

01 May 2012 |Michael Schapira and David Backer 
<http://www.full-stop.net/author/michael-schapira-and-david-backer/> 	


    /In his new book,/Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the
    Urban Revolution
    <http://www.versobooks.com/books/1116-rebel-cities>,/ David
    Harvey//successfully brings together decades of thinking on Marx,
    contemporary politics, and urbanization//. We sat down with
    Professor Harvey in his office at CUNY and discussed how the ideas
    in his new book connect with both longstanding preoccupations and
    our own contemporary moment./

*Schapira: One thing that stood out for me in/Rebel Cities/was your 
neologism "commoning" (which I might define as the creative 
appropriation of already existing public spaces, for new ways of 
understanding our common interests and laying claim to common 
resources). It is an interesting variation on other ways that the common 
has been brought up recently --- for example, /Commonwealth 
<http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-9780674060289-0>/**, or Communism, or 
the "digital commons." Where does commoning fit into this broader picture?*

Harvey: One of my favorite essays of Marx is from very early on, and is 
called "For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing 
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm>." You kind 
of approach anything of this kind, the commons, with the notion: what's 
it saying, and what are its problems? How can you rescue the concept in 
such a way that it doesn't end up in a blind alley? For instance, in 
that essay [in/Rebel Cities/], a lot of the things I was reading about 
the commons --- especially in Britain --- [contained] a sort of 
nostalgia for something that never really existed.

The enclosure of the commons is generally seen as a very wicked thing, 
but actually when you look at it there are certain forms of enclosure 
that are very good. I see the point politically, that it's trying to 
create a world in which we can define and express our common interests 
and act upon them. But then the common interests of the bourgeoisie 
aren't necessarily the ones that we'd like to act upon, so the question 
of who gets to enclose something becomes rather critical. I've visited 
anarchist communes that have fences around them. There was one in Chile 
where they had a very strong fence around them because marauders would 
come and steal everything, otherwise. They had to protect their space. 
To say that all enclosures are bad is not the way to go. It becomes a 
political question of how you use the commons and who uses it for what 
purpose.

*Schapira: Someone traced the idea of commoning to Hannah Arendt's idea 
of public political action, which is premised on a securing of the 
public sphere. But you mentioned this nostalgia for a perhaps 
non-existing idea of the pure commons --- as you just said, this idea of 
the loss of the commons comes up strongly in Occupy and other movements 
today --- which seems to be a Romantic notion. Have figures like 
Wordsworth or William Morris influenced your understanding of this trend?*

Well, early on I went through my Romantic phase and had great affection 
for these figures. I got immersed in Keats and Shelley, never took to 
Byron that much, but Wordsworth to some degree. I think there's a strain 
of it in Marx; particularly in the early writings you see more of this 
Romanticist thinking. And it never really goes away. For instance, how 
can you really talk about notions of alienation without invoking some 
sense of dispossession and loss, and this search to regain an 
un-alienated existence? Now there is the big question of whether [such 
an existence] ever really existed. So if the political project from a 
Marxist standpoint is to recuperate some kind of un-alienated world of 
laboring and socializing and so on, then it seems to me that it's very 
hard to do that without taking some threads from the Romantics as to 
what might be possible.

You mentioned humanism, which is very interesting. Everyone seems to be 
talking about humanism these days. I encountered it five times last week 
at different meetings and in different situations. I go away for a year 
and come back and suddenly everyone is talking about humanism, and I 
wonder, Where the fuck did that come from? What are they thinking, and 
why is it there? I was actually in a conference where I was supposed to 
talk about this relationship between China and the human. What would be 
we talking about if we said "between China and human nature"? What would 
we be talking about if we said "between China and --- invoking Marx's 
notion (I guess it's Kant's, too) --- of species being"?

 From Marx's perspective, human nature is an unfinished project. The big 
question from Marx's perspective is: what kind of human nature are we 
going to try and create, and how do we do that? It's an evolutionary 
process. The problem with the concept of humanism is that it assumes 
that there is some sort of essentialism about what it means to be human. 
It becomes almost a normative concept towards which we strive, even 
though we usually fail to achieve it. I can see its function at all 
these conferences. It was a way of getting around the postmodern 
fragmentations, the poststructuralist deconstructions, and put in its 
place some kind of solid aspirational concept. It has a peculiar 
function, because it becomes essentialist, but you can embed other 
essentialisms in it. You can say feminism is in humanism, anti-racism is 
within humanism, to be queer is within humanism. It's an umbrella 
concept under which you can merge a lot of the history of identity politics.

In the/Right to the City/chapter I try to do something different by 
asking very concrete questions, saying that what kinds of cities we want 
to make cannot be divorced from what kinds of people we want to be. 
Therefore, if we see human nature as an unfinished project, then one of 
the things that we have to think about is, What kinds of cities do we 
design and redesign? How do we redesign urbanization to achieve a 
different kind of notion of what it means to be human?

I'm old enough to remember that back in the '60s the notion of what it 
meant to be human was radically different than what it is now. We've all 
become neoliberals to some degree. That's very different from those 
worlds in which we were supposed to be solidarious with our union 
brothers and solidarious with some notion of community. We're all 
individuals now, racing around provisioning for ourselves, accumulating 
as much wealth as we possibly can. Adam Smith supposedly tells us that 
that is a good thing to do, because it is how society grows and 
benefits. We've absorbed all of that.

*Backer: I wanted to follow up a bit on the thread of alienation. I 
sometimes see this idea of alienation conceived of as a failure to be 
human. I hear people using that concept in that way, such that when we 
exist in an alienating structural context, what we are being is inhuman. 
But what's interesting in this concept of human nature as an unfinished 
project is that you can ask concrete questions, like what cities we want 
to make. It doesn't seem like you are saying that we're failing to be 
human in an alienated context. It's something else. We haven't created 
the right project yet.*

I would think of it that way. I don't think of alienation as being 
alienated from some essentialist conception of what we should be. If we 
build cities the way we build them right now, we're going to build a 
kind of consciousness. My particular bête noir has always been the 
suburbs. If you build suburbs, you get a suburban political 
consciousness; you get a suburban human being, with all that goes with 
it. And, frankly, that's not the kind of human being that I admire. Now, 
I'm not going to say that they're not human; they are very human, in 
fact. As human beings, we always adapt to our environments in certain 
ways; adapt our mental conceptions of the world according to the kinds 
of experiential world in which we exist. It is not inhuman to be that 
way in the suburbs. But what you have to do is build something 
completely different so that people end up being human in a completely 
different way. You can say I'd like to be human in that way, rather than 
this way. And therefore it's a class conflict, it's a cultural conflict, 
and so on.

*Backer: I've been wondering about the state of the class struggle, 
specifically in terms of the influence of credit. How do we draw class 
lines now in a system of credit, where I can afford things that I can't 
afford, or I can afford to buy my way into a class that traditionally I 
might not have been included in? I find it hard to draw the same lines 
that I might want to when reading Marx.*

I'm not quite sure what you are saying there. You are focusing on 
consumption. I don't think you can get at the question of class very 
easily through consumption. Marx has a very interesting way of putting 
this. He says that when the worker receives their wage, at that point 
they cease to be a worker. They become a consumer and buyer. The 
relationship that they then engage in is that between buyer and seller. 
He says that basically the worker in the marker has a great deal of 
freedom of choice, depending of course on how much their wage is and 
depending also on what their needs and desires happen to be. This gets 
into the question of whether there is a class of goods called wage goods 
that are absolute necessities. He says, well, necessities include things 
like tobacco, so if you started to define class by who smokes and who 
doesn't you have a class of smokers and non-smokers, but that wouldn't 
tell you anything about the dynamics of capitalism.

At the end of Volume 2 of/Capital/he says that the capitalist has a 
problem, because when the workers get out there with money in their 
pocket the capitalist will be concerned with how they spend their money. 
They will seek to influence the working class to what he calls "rational 
consumption," which is rational from the standpoint of capital 
accumulation, not necessarily rational from the standpoint of their 
wants, their needs, their desires. The classic example is Henry Ford 
creating the equivalent of the Russell Sage Foundation to go in and tell 
workers how to spend. When he went to the $5, 8-hour day he was very 
concerned about the fact that the workers would go out and spend all 
that money on booze and women and all this stuff that wouldn't be pieces 
of "rational consumption." So he sent in all these social workers that 
told you how to organize your budget to make sure you didn't spend it on 
drink and women. There was this incredible concern with rational 
consumption, which suggests that the worker at the point of consumption 
can do all kinds of things. And, of course, as soon as you extend credit 
to the worker, then the worker can do all kinds of things with it, as we 
saw in the housing bubble. Some people who couldn't afford housing got a 
house because there was zero down payment and [they] lived in it 
basically free of charge --- and if they got out in time, some people 
made out like bandits. And there is nothing in Marx to say that this 
can't happen.

Actually, he has some very interesting passages that are very important 
to me, given my interests in urbanization. When you look at the 
capitalist class as a whole, and the question of where surplus value is 
produced and where it is realized, these are two different questions. 
This comes up in/Rebel Cities/. It may be produced in production, but 
the producer may not get much of it because they have to pay very high 
wages to the worker, and then the worker goes out and gets robbed by the 
landlords, the shopkeepers, and particularly by the credit merchants and 
the usurers. The capitalist class can be getting filthy rich, but it is 
mainly realized by getting all of its surplus value through rent and 
these other areas. This is one of the problems I have with all these 
people who try and study the falling rate of profit by measuring the 
profit rate of what's going on in production. What I'm saying is that 
doesn't tell you what surplus value is being produced at all, because 
you only know that when it's realized, and it's mainly realized 
somewhere else in the circulation process. Marx talks about that in 
Volume 3 and says that it is very extensive, particularly in Britain and 
the United States. This is a classic way that the bourgeoisie recaptures 
what it has yielded in the wage bargain. Since the 1970s, that is 
particularly what it has been doing --- recapturing it through all these 
other secondary forms, which Marxists by and large don't look at very 
carefully. One of the things that I try and do with Marx is say that you 
have to start looking at these other forms of where the surplus is realized.

*Schapira: Has moving to New York helped you move along those lines, 
given the scarcity of land here, centralization of profit, and the 
history of the bankrupting of the city in the 1970s and the 
reorganization that followed?*

I was always interested in that, but I could also see this kind of thing 
in Second Empire Paris, and also I saw it big time when I was involved 
in the rent control movement in Baltimore in the 1970s. You could see 
clearly how these appropriations were occurring in the city. It was the 
transition of the inner city of Baltimore into the territory of/The 
Wire/. But it becomes particularly obvious in Manhattan, where the rate 
of recuperation of the surplus through rent and property markets is just 
huge.

*Schapira: That is certainly spilling over the bridge into Brooklyn, 
now. I'm not sure where Crown Heights is meant to be located, because 
Prospect Heights keeps pushing further and further to where it's going 
to end up in the ocean at some point.*

Exactly, this is a very important part of capital accumulation. Because 
Marx and the left were largely concentrating on factories and factory 
employment a lot of this stuff has not been looked at. But there is some 
data now that a group of people have been working on, from about 16th 
and the 17th century onward, and what it tends to show is that the 
British bourgeoisie got far more money out of land speculation than they 
ever got out of the Manchester factories. You can see that in terms of 
class configuration, because the aristocracy became the center of 
finance capital. So it was all the aristocrats that really formed the 
city of London. And they could form the city because of the wealth that 
they were getting out of the rents. There was this alliance between rent 
seeking on the one hand and finance capital on the other hand. And Marx 
actually mentions that, in a chapter on primitive accumulation where he 
talks about the formation of a "bankocracy" through landed wealth 
becoming converted into finance and forming that nexus.

Even in my youth, at Cambridge, this was visible. Were the wealthy 
people the kids of industrialists? No, they were the kids of landed 
families, finance, and city of London kind of stuff. That is where the 
real wealth was all along. You can look at something similar in New 
York, but this goes on globally. Many of the billionaires that have 
erupted in China made their money in property development, and now they 
are some of the richest people in the world.

*Schapira: You talk about the odd political subject that gets developed 
in the suburban context. But I've been thinking about Britain and 
austerity, and the kind of subject and city that austerity produces. 
You've seen spasms against austerity measures in London and across 
Europe. In Britain it took the form of destruction of property, so a 
reaction was visible in the urban fabric itself. I'm wondering about the 
kind of political subject that austerity is meant to produce, and what 
hope you see in the resistances to it.*

Well, to the second part, spontaneous outbreaks of rage --- which I 
think are certainly understandable --- I don't think are helpful. I 
think that what differentiated, say, Occupy Wall Street from the London 
riots and the French riots is that Occupy Wall Street had an agenda of 
sorts and stuck with it. The permanence of it was very significant, and 
it did change the conversation, so that in this country there is now a 
significant conversation unfolding about questions of social inequality, 
which wasn't there before.

But there is a question of the relationship between austerity politics 
and social inequality. Why is it that austerity politics actually deepen 
social inequality? And is austerity politics part of a class project 
that aims precisely to do that? In other words, is austerity a way of 
securing even more privileges and wealth for the very upper classes? And 
there is a lot of evidence in this country that the wealthy, by and 
large, survived the recession very well and have come out for the most 
part in an even stronger position than before. In a sense, what has been 
a sort of daylight robbery of much of the rest of the population has 
come through a process that I've called "accumulation by dispossession." 
The accumulation of wealth in the upper classes has taken this 
particular trajectory, that needs to be addressed. The Democratic Party 
is playing a little bit out on the fringes on social inequality, but 
it's not going too far.

*Schapira: I don't know if you've been reading about Quebec andthe 
student protests there 
<http://www.full-stop.net/2012/04/12/blog/michael-schapira/quebec-students-prefer-not-to/>**. 
The government is asking for a seemingly insignificant increase in 
tuition, if you look at things relative to the other Canadian provinces 
and the U.S., but the students are really drawing a line in the sand, 
saying that the government is trying to privatize this public good and 
offload their deficits onto individuals. They've been on strike for over 
six weeks now.*

In Chile, some were on strike for a whole year. I was over there; it was 
kind of fantastic actually. There are things going on there that are not 
going on elsewhere, and the Chilean students movement was just 
phenomenal. Camilla Vallejo is a geographer actually, so I had a chance 
to meet her. They seem not to have some of the hang-ups that David 
Graeber and I weretalking 
<http://mhpbooks.com/events/david-graber-at-cuny-graduate-center/>about . . 
. where everything has to be horizontal, which sometimes gets 
fetishized. I've been critical of what I call a fetishization of 
organizational form that exists in some areas of the Left. David 
Graeber's position was that he believes in horizontality, but as a 
movement develops you almost invariably end up with some sort of nested 
hierarchy of configurations. But his line is basically that these should 
only be within structures of legitimate forms of authority. And as soon 
as a mass of the people considers the forms to be illegitimate then they 
have to be removed, so there is a kind of fluidity as opposed to fixity 
of a structure.

The question of organizational forms is very interesting. In Chile I was 
very impressed with it. It's not that they don't have divisions. The 
main division seems to be between people who really believe in street 
action and street violence and those who believe in a more Gandhian 
non-violent kind of thing. Of course the suspicion always is that those 
who are perusing violence are the provocateurs rather than the real 
participants. And I think that problem of infiltration and 
provacateurism is a real one . . . I'm sure the Occupy movement is now 
highly infiltrated by police informants.

*Schapira: There is a call for a general strike on May 1st --- at least 
in New York City. What do you think of taking up these forms of dissent 
and protest from the past? Occupation was very much in the political 
imagination of the 1960s, but it has come back into our discourse with 
new force as a protest tactic. Do you see this reiteration of old 
tactics as a productive way to move forward, or do you think some sort 
of innovation needs to occur?*

I think some innovations need to occur. One of the things that David and 
I agreed on . . . was that we often formulate our organizational 
strategies in terms which are drawn from some past series of events. The 
anti-globalization movement was in large part informed 
by/autonomista/thinking, which came from Italy in the 1970s. We're in 
danger right now of again appealing backwards to old forms.

I personally think that the call for a general strike was a mistake. It 
has a history, it has a meaning. First off, I don't think it's possible 
to have a general strike right now in the way you might have done in the 
1920s and the days of the mass strike. If you are going to call for it, 
you better make sure it really happens. I think that they should have 
called it a day or action or something of that kind, and in effect that 
is what they are doing. Instead of saying that people shouldn't show up 
for work, they are saying that you do something different. I think there 
is a recognition among some of the Occupy people that I've talked to 
that it was not the best strategy, but they can't just call the strike off.

*Schapira: They've already printed up the posters.*

They've printed up the posters, they've got the rhetoric, and all of 
that. But I think if you read the fine print, it is "do whatever you 
can, there are all these different actions all over the place, let's 
create as many possible points of activism and visibility that we can, 
and see what happens."

I think the other question is what is going to happen after.  I don't 
think anybody really quite knows.

*Backer: I've also been thinking about what happens after, given the 
kind of charged feelings that come from confrontations at places like 
Zuccotti Park. I wonder if this tension would be less present if a wider 
phenomenon were to occur.*

One of the examples that I've found historically very important is 
theMadres de Plaza de Mayo 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_of_the_Plaza_de_Mayo>in Buenos 
Aires. They really changed the course of Argentinian history. They went 
out there and just walked around. They got harassed by police, but they 
came back every week and they walked around. The authorities at some 
point couldn't figure out what to do. They would pick people up and 
arrest them sometimes, but some of these people were grandmothers, so 
this wasn't looking very well, with all these photos in the press.

I wonder whether Occupy might not think of something of that sort. If 
you are not allowed to have backpacks in Zuccotti Park, okay. Go down 
there without backpacks. Do they have a dress code there that says you 
can't wear a certain kind of t-shirt? Are they going to do something 
like that? So suddenly if, I don't know, every Thursday at 5:00 a few 
hundred people appear wearing t-shirts of some kind wander into the park 
and just walk around. It could be a silent kind of protest. What kind of 
world would we be in if people just wearing a t-shirt couldn't do this? 
You press the legitimacy --- this is the point about the legitimacy of 
authority. You press authority to behave in such a way that it loses its 
legitimacy entirely. The legitimacy of government in this country is at 
a pretty low point already. I think some tactics like that would be 
interesting. It seems to me that there are intermediate things between 
camping overnight and occupying a space for a long time.

*Schapira: Michel Foucault writes at one point about the specific 
intellectual vs. the general intellectual. He says that Sartre is an 
example of the general intellectual, who speaks for the Left on all 
sorts of matters. Specific intellectuals, on the other hand, work and 
intervene within a more bounded context. If you are an expert in 
housing, for example, you participate in housing debates. Foucault talks 
about two dangers that arise for the specific intellectual. One is that 
you can be swallowed up or manipulated by a bigger group, like a 
political party. The other is the problem that you have raised, which is 
not finding a big enough audience or not making your strategy general 
enough to link up with other movements. I don't know if this came up in 
your talk with David Graeber, but I'm wondering how you might see 
yourself as an intellectual in relation to a movement like Occupy. Are 
you specific in the way that you intervene?*

Well, I don't really see myself in this sense, because I don't really 
think about my role as an intellectual. It's just that certain things 
crop up. I am specifically interested in urbanization, but even though 
that sounds specific, it's actually quite general.

*Schapira: Is there a way that people tend to approach you, or specific 
things that they ask of you, whether it's just to come speak to a group 
or whether it's more concrete advice that they are asking for?*

It varies a lot. I often talk to architects, and obviously in that case 
you get to talking about space and spatial organization. I've talked at 
law schools, and they are more interested in questions of how to 
articulate the right to the city, or something of that kind. Is there a 
legal aspect to it, and if so what might it be? How does that actually 
impinge upon the general question of the rights of the homeless, or 
housing rights, or if housing is a human right? If it were a group like 
that, then clearly they would want me to orient what I'm saying to their 
specific interests.

But, by and large, I would say that they know their specific interests 
better than I do, and if anything, what they are trying to do is to 
locate their specific interests in a more general picture. I suspect 
that what they are looking for is more for me to help generalize what 
they are doing into a broader understanding of how the world is working, 
how capitalism works. If you can explain how capitalism works in 
relation to, for instance, housing provisionment, or capital 
accumulation through housing markets, then the general theory becomes 
more comprehensible for people working in those fields. The general 
theory can illuminate something about what they are doing that maybe 
they hadn't thought about before.

*Schapira: One thing that has always bothered me is that when people are 
discussing your work they always go out of their way to say how clear it 
is, and how there is an analytic coolness to it. I always took this to 
be an implicit critique of a lot of leftist thinking and leftist social 
theory --- that it has this obscurantist strain in it. Do you accept 
that critique, and is it in your mind when you are going about your work?*

I don't like a lot of the obscurantism that exists on the left. Part of 
my personal project over the last 10-15 years has been to make Marx much 
more comprehensible, which I've been trying to do with theonline 
lectures <http://davidharvey.org/>and the companion to Volume 1 
of/Capital./I'm just finishing up a companion to Volume 2. I think a lot 
of people, when they are dealing with Marx, make him more complicated 
than he already is, and I don't think that's helpful at all. So part of 
my concern is to try to write as clearly as I can. I had this joking 
relationship with the publisher who did/Enigma of Capital/who said, "If 
you write in a way that is very obscure, then you will create a vast 
industry of graduate students who are trying to figure out what the fuck 
you were trying to say." There are journals of Foucault Studies and 
Derrida Studies, but I hope that there won't have to be journals of 
Harvey Studies, because hopefully readers can understand what I'm trying 
to talk about.

But that comes back to a general issue. The defense of Marx was very 
much located in the academy. And in the academy you have to show your 
paces, and there is a certain pressure to sound deeply intelligent. 
Therefore keeping Marx Studies alive --- if you want to call it that --- 
became very academist and affected by these sorts of things. But I think 
it did keep it alive. So the obscurantism came out of that and I 
understand it historically very much in those terms. To some degree I 
was caught up in that in the 1970s and 1980s.

Those of us who understand this literature have a political obligation 
right now to write things that are as clear as possible, without 
glossing over ideas and without patronizing by making it too simplistic. 
This is a difficult balance to strike. In the new book I get into some 
fairly complicated aspects of Marxist theory, about fictitious capital 
for example. I think this is a very interesting category, so I want to 
launch it out there so that people can think about it. But in doing that 
I realize people might say that this is hard going. It seems to me that 
there is some way in which it is very necessary in writing to try to 
challenge people to explore new concepts and new ideas and things that 
they haven't really looked at before. At the same time you can't be so 
into that that the work becomes downright incomprehensible. It's a 
difficult line to have, but I've been vey conscious of it over the past 
10-15 years. Now, it doesn't always succeed; sometimes it goes too much 
this way and sometimes it goes too much that way.

I don't think there are many people writing in the Marxist mode these 
days who try to do it. I think that this means that Marx's thinking and 
Marx's analysis and general framework is nowhere near as widely 
appreciated and understood as it should be, because we have not 
succeeded in doing that. I've been very happy in the response to the 
Marx lectures. I got an email from somebody who is 70 years old the 
other day saying "I always wanted to read/Capital/, but nobody ever 
helped me, and I've finally done it and it was such a good experience." 
You realize that there is a potential audience out there who are 
interested in this, which is extremely rewarding.


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