David Harvey

Reflections David Harvey Interviewed by Alberto Toscano David Harvey is at present Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). One of the world’s foremost academic geographers and a prominent Marxist theorist, Harvey has also taught at Bristol, Oxford and Johns Hopkins. His first book, Explanation in Geography (1969) was an important intervention into the philosophy and methodology of geography. In his 1973 Social Justice and the City, Harvey articulated a deeply influential critical geography, which married rigorous theoretical inquiry with a radical concern for the injustices and inequalities of capitalism, especially as expressed in processes of urbanization. Harvey’s turn to Marx was crystallized in The Limits to Capital (1982), a formidable engagement with the critique of political economy aimed at producing a ‘historical-geographical materialism’ that could account for the spatio-temporal trajectories and configurations of capital accumulation. This distinctive approach was applied to the crises and transformations of contemporary capitalism in The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), where Harvey diagnosed a new pattern of ‘flexible accumulation’ whose effects trespassed the domain of work to encompass a mutation in cultural, architectural and experiential forms. Harvey’s numerous contributions also include writings on utopia, the body in capitalism, nineteenth-century Paris, and the philosophy of justice. AT: With the publication of The New Imperialism in 2003 you made a forceful and influential contribution to the resurgent debates on the theory and reality of imperialism. The book (and the lectures from which it was drawn) was obviously catalysed by the then-impending invasion of Iraq, and by the need, as you put it in the book’s preface, to ‘penetrate beneath the surface flux to divine some of the deeper currents in the making of the world’s historical geography that might shed some light on why we have arrived at such a dangerous and difficult conjuncture’. Is this recent attempt on your part to tackle, from a critical geographical perspective, this locus classicus of Marxism a sign that we are witnessing a significant discontinuity or novelty C Institute of Social Studies 2007. Published Development and Change 38(6): 1127–1135 (2007).  by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA 1128 Alberto Toscano in the functioning of what you call the twin logics of territorial and capitalist power? Is imperialism a concept that grasps one of the ‘deeper currents’ you mention (that is, one that accompanies, in different guises, the spatial history of capitalism), or is its role rather that of capturing a volatile conjuncture? DH: I prefer to think of ‘imperialisms’ in the plural and to interpret them as specific spatial and geographical strategies on the part of nation states or collections of nation states designed to solve the fundamental underlying contradictions of capitalism. The fundamental problem for capitalism, as I see it, is to absorb the capital surpluses (‘excess liquidity’, as the head of the IMF prefers to call it) that are perpetually being produced, and to do so preferably without devaluations of capital. If devaluation is the only possibility then imperialist strategies involve finding ways to dump the problem somewhere else (for example the export of devaluation of surplus capital from the US and Europe to East and Southeast Asia by the hedge funds in 1997–8). When capitalists have excess capital where they are, then they turn to geographical expansion as a solution. In so doing they need the state to clear the way and secure the terrain (peacefully or militarily) where the expansion can occur without too much trouble. Woodrow Wilson (that great liberal) put it exactly when he said: Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused. 1 The barriers that need to be cleared away include labour-market and natural resource (particularly energy) constraints; market access constraints; barriers to corporate control (including competitive advantage and the ability to orchestrate takeovers) and the failure of governments to provide and guarantee a good investment climate. The innovative point that I made in The New Imperialism is to insist that we must follow the capital surpluses and analyse the state strategies that attach to them. What we then see is capital surpluses becoming very important in South Korea and Taiwan in the mid to late 1980s and shortly thereafter we hear all kinds of stories of brutal labour practices attaching to Taiwanese and South Korean subcontractors operating throughout the rest of East and Southeast Asia as well as in Central America and Africa. Now, we don’t normally think of South Korea and Taiwan as imperialist powers but what we start to see is state support for certain 1. From a lecture at Columbia University, April 1907, cited in Williams (1959: 72). Interview with David Harvey 1129 imperialist practices (‘subcontracted’ imperialism attaching to US corporate interests). China now has massive surpluses to dispose of and we have seen the emergence of certain imperialist practices on their part in recent years, too. But again this is very different from the strategies that have evolved in the US over time and taken a distinctive (re)turn towards direct military interventionism in Iraq, along the lines of what occurred in Central America in the 1920s. Rather than speak of a theory of imperialism, therefore, I would rather write about a whole field of imperialist practices that can sometimes converge into macro geopolitical conflicts and even descend into inter-imperialist wars. We need to see how such wars arise out of a more complicated terrain of diversified imperialist practices that are part of everyday life around the world, all emanating from the problem of how capitalists can profitably dispose of the surpluses they generate. AT: At different points in its history, the discipline of geography has been profoundly implicated in the production of imperialist and colonialist knowledge. What kind of resources has it provided you with in your attempt to construct an anti-imperialist conceptualization of imperialism, resources that might be absent from theories originating in other disciplinary fields? DH: I can’t think of a field of study that has not been both tainted and informed by its participation in the imperialist project (forestry, botany, geology, as well as economics, anthropology and geography). But the emphasis in geography upon cartographic techniques, territorial configurations and differences, shifting space relations and what I call the dialectics of socio-environmental change has provided me with some special insights. This puts me at odds with the way in which, for example, Jeffrey Sachs or Jared Diamond conceive of geography as nothing more than fixed and unchanging physical environmental conditions and spatial location. Their manner of construing geography is profoundly misleading and politically dangerous (how comforting it is to read Jared Diamond and sorrowfully record how the problems of the Congo have nothing to do with the Belgians and King Leopold but everything to do with environmental conditionalities!). With Sachs, overcoming the deficits of a given geography takes centre stage in the drive to eliminate poverty rather than confronting the neoliberal capitalism that produces poverty where there was none before. AT: Rather than providing a comfortable platform for analysis and denunciation, your confrontation with imperialism has entailed ‘retooling’ certain concepts to capture the specific configurations of contemporary political economy. A case in point is your use of Marx’s discussion of ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ in Capital to delineate what 1130 Alberto Toscano you call ‘accumulation by dispossession’, a polymorphous type of predatory capital accumulation that covers phenomena from biopiracy to privatization. Is this resort to a notion that traditionally refers to the dawn of capitalism in order to grasp a novel conjuncture, a sign that not just geographical development but historical development too is ‘uneven’? Does this give credence to those post-colonial critiques of the social sciences that strongly questioned the supposed ‘linearity’ of Eurocentric theories of history, Marxism included? DH: I object to teleological, Whig or even ‘progressive’ and historicist readings of history in the same way that I object to simple geographical diffusionist views and prefer to speak instead of uneven geographical development as the central anchor to what historical geographical materialism is about. In Marx’s Capital, for example, he makes it seem as if the factory system is destined to drive out all other forms of the labour process even as he admits of the existence of all manner of other and ‘hybrid’ forms. My point is that there are many different labour systems that can be deployed by capitalists in the search for surplus value and they will switch from one to the other, sometimes reverting to older systems (like contemporary versions of the putting-out system). The geographical possibilities vary (Hong Kong uses sweatshops for subcontracting and South Korea went for big factories and got unions) as do the historical circumstances (for example strong versus weak labour organization). It is also distressing to see how certain ideas become universal panaceas in development discourses. Remember when Turner (an anarchist) proposed sites and services systems as a solution to urban poverty in developing countries in the 1970s and the World Bank turned it into a policy that enriched all manner of contractors? What was touted as ‘the’ solution in the 1970s did little or nothing to alleviate the aggregate problems. Now we see microcredit being pushed as the answer, and moving from a supposedly charitable endeavour to a financial system extracting high rates of return from impoverished peoples (they need the discipline of the market to whip them into shape!). Free trade dogma is advocated with the claim that a rising tide will lift all boats, when all it does is to launch a series of financial tsunamis that smash everything before the waters recede, leaving behind a landscape of total social and environmental devastation (Indonesia in 1998, Argentina in 2001. . .). But then there are remarkable surges of capitalist development that last a while (remember the 1980s when we all felt Japan and West Germany had it made), and then recede (Japan and to some degree Germany in the 1990s). Now look at the rise of China, the emergence of India and the re-emergence of Russia as power centres. The historical geographical volatility is remarkable and linear interpretations can’t capture that. Interview with David Harvey 1131 AT: Unlike other theorists who have turned to Marx’s thinking on primitive accumulation you seem convinced that some varieties of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ are inevitable and indeed, from a socialist point of view, sometimes a necessary condition for emancipation. Could you elaborate on this position, and indicate how it demarcates itself from the view, held among certain Marxists and repeated by some liberal apologists of the current war drive, that imperialism itself can at times play a ‘progressive’ role? DH: Imperialism plays a transformative role (cut out the ‘progressive’) and as such opens up new possibilities upon which progressive forces can capitalize (if that is the right word). How ‘progressive’ these forces are (socialist or bourgeois-nationalist) and whether they can seize upon the new possibilities in a big way are contingent questions. In Iraq, the progressive forces are being annihilated by the regressive. What I would want to avoid, however, is a backward-looking nostalgia for some idealized past when we were supposedly close to nature or living in the (repressive) intimacy of small-scale communities. And I don’t want to make it seem as if all forms of dispossession are bad (for example, land reform and public takeover of resources for the public good, to say nothing of the dissolution of feudal structures). Our task is always to pursue what is possible in the here and now and some of the elements of the here and now that might be worth preserving have been products of the imperialist enterprise (such as public health and infrastructure projects). There is, however, a big question in my mind as to how we address the tremendous variety in the historical and geographical experience of forms of social relations, technologies, modes of production and reproduction, ways of life, mental conceptions and knowledges of the world (to cite a wonderful footnote at the beginning of Marx’s chapter on machinery in Capital), in order to mine it for ideas as to how we might construct a better future. I am not dismissive of past experiences as a source of inspiration for future possibilities (the idea that ‘hope is a memory that desires’ is very important to me), but I am at war with false nostalgias. AT: In your most recent book, Spaces of Global Capitalism (2006), you have sketched out the parameters for what you call ‘a theory of uneven geographical development’. How do you think such a theory could serve to unify and enrich other accounts of development? In particular, what are your views on ‘development’ as a disciplinary field, on the one hand, and as a political and institutional discourse, on the other? DH: I have problems with development as an institutional discourse and as a disciplinary field. It seems to rest on some unilinear idea of progress and of inevitable geographical diffusion of well-being that is misleading if not illusory. It is for this reason that I prefer to think in terms of uneven geographical development as a structural conditionality for 1132 Alberto Toscano the perpetuation of a capitalist mode of production. There are times, of course, when the uneven geographical development appears to be relatively stable; when, for example, a dominant and hegemonic centre of capitalist development (such as the US after World War II) appears to be in control (only in those phases does the world system theory division of centre and periphery make any sense). But what we always have to watch for are the molecular changes which undermine such configurations and eventually produce tectonic shifts between metropolitan areas (the emergence of nineteenth-century Manchester or the recent reconstitution of Barcelona), regions (for example the emergence of Silicon Valley, Bavaria, Bangalore, the Pearl River Delta or the broader rise of the US South and West after World War II), nation states (for example Japanese and West German dominance in the 1980s) and power shifts between macro-regions (Asia since the 1990s). Geographical shifts (what I call ‘spatial fixes’) in flows of surplus capital, labour and resources all play a role and there can be reversals here (such as the painful history of deindustrialization in Pittsburgh, Sheffield and Mumbai), as well as rapid advances there. Interregional competition means that someone, somewhere, is always doing OK and this keeps the image of capitalism as a success story alive, even as most of the world suffers from the depredations and exploitations upon which capitalism fundamentally rests. AT: How can a historical-geographical materialism help us, for instance, in grasping the challenges posed by the exponential growth in ‘slum’type urbanization, with all of its social and political effects? DH: Last year I had the opportunity to go to cities like Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Santiago de Chile and the year before I was in the Pearl River and Yangtze Delta areas in China. What impresses me is that not only do you see massive evidence of increasingly marginalized populations living and barely surviving in dire conditions, but everywhere there is a massive construction boom under way that has a lot to do with absorbing the currently-existing excess capital and liquidity in a massive global urbanization project. I personally don’t like the way the word ‘slum’ has come back into use (although I understand why it has), because in my mind it is always associated with moral opprobrium and ‘clearance’. In many urban areas poor people are being forced off high-value urban land to make way for large capital projects. In Mumbai and New Delhi the forced evacuations (a case of accumulation by dispossession) have had serious consequences and the Indian Supreme Court has legitimized such actions (without compensation for those who do not hold legal title to the land, on the grounds that compensating such slum dwellers would be equivalent to rewarding pickpockets for their actions!) as in the public interest — much as the US Supreme Court has confirmed the use of eminent domain to Interview with David Harvey 1133 displace viable neighbourhoods with more lucrative upper income condos or box stores. The point is to look at contemporary urban processes not only in terms of ‘slum’ formation but also to see these processes as juxtaposed and in conflict with the vast building boom of offices, upper income accommodations (usually fortified) and a variety of megaprojects (vital, as I have said, to the absorption of surplus capital). This is uneven capitalist geographical development with a vengeance, producing fragmented and divided cities all over the world. AT: Your book on the new imperialism was followed by a closely related study, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), which identifies the fundamental dynamic of neoliberalism as the ‘restoration of class power’. What, in your view, is the articulation between neoliberalism and imperialism? And is the attempt to think of them in conjunction also to be understood as a manner of taking a polemical distance from the theoretical preoccupation with globalization, and, in the sense given to this term by Hardt and Negri (2000), with ‘Empire’? DH: In the neoliberalism book I pay much greater attention to the class forces involved in global restructuring, the mechanisms they used and the actual tactics they deployed (the practicalities of which are ignored entirely by Hardt and Negri). I recognize more explicitly that internal class powers (in Mexico, Argentina or Chile for example) played a critical role in alliance with external class forces which often appeared to be imperialist in the way they dictated structural adjustments and programmatic reforms. It then became possible for internal elites, benefiting immensely from the transition to neoliberalism, to blame the imperialists and their institutions (like the IMF) for the plight of local populations. The deployment of anti-imperialist rhetoric in Latin America, for example, helps shield local elites (like Carlos Slim, one of the world’s wealthiest individuals, and the other billionaires in Mexico) from criticism. This does not mean that imperialism is a fiction, but it does suggest we should be careful about accepting anti-imperialist claims at face value. The specific character of imperialist strategies in the present conjuncture is dependent upon the complex relation between neoliberal restructurings worldwide and the neoconservative attempt (not confined to the US because elements of a similar politics can be found in Europe, East Asia and Russia) to establish and maintain a coherent moral order in both the global and various national situations. I think the neocon fantasy in the US is to turn the country into a version of contemporary China — a single party political system (the republocrats) with authoritarian powers riding the tiger of an unregulated capitalism delivering immense benefits to a small political-economic elite. But these elites frequently find it necessary to look beyond the borders of the nation state for their sustenance and so imperialist strategies 1134 Alberto Toscano are taking a variety of new forms, such as predatory raiding on whole economies by the hedge funds orchestrated through a financial architecture largely created at the behest of the US but with support from Europe and Japan, all of whom benefit from this new arrangement. AT: In The New Imperialism you suggest a distinction, founded on your political-economic analysis, between movements contesting the myriad forms of accumulation by dispossession and ‘traditional’ forms of working class mobilization around expanded reproduction. What are the conditions for being able to articulate these two forms of militancy? What types of struggles might move beyond the potential particularism of the former and the weakness of the latter? DH: It is true that many of the struggles against accumulation by dispossession are local, but that does not mean they are always particular and have no universal content. Struggles against biopiracy in the Amazon parallel those in the Philippines and there are universal aspects to both. By the same token, labour struggles that have traditionally grounded the concept of universalism in Left politics also have a local character and have had a hard time being truly internationalist. We now see the beginnings of more effective global and cross-border organizing in both arenas of struggle. The reason I thought it important to draw the distinction is because there has been a tendency for Left traditionalists and labour organizers to ignore struggles against dispossession, while those struggling against dispossessions through enclosure of the commons, privatization and the predatory behaviours of corporate capital in the spheres of consumption, reproduction (for example, health) and environmental degradation sometimes view the traditional labour movement as hostile to their concerns. I marked the difference in order to try to establish some of the commonalities — dispossession occurs in the labour process as well as outside of it so why not put them together in a broader-based coalition politics of the dispossessed? I know that sounds glib and it certainly glosses over a lot of difficulties (such as who the enemies are and where they can be located in each case) but I think it important that we see the potential for unity as the general political objective towards which we are all willing to work. AT: What role might the forging of theoretical tools such as the ones you have provided in your books play in furthering the communication between these struggles and the fashioning of common agendas, or even forms of solidarity? What do you think are the pitfalls of theoretical deficit or eclecticism for political activism? DH: I think it is very important for those of us who have the resources and the time to reflect on what is going on and the skills to give some theoretical interpretation to events, to listen very carefully to the Interview with David Harvey 1135 wide-ranging experiences recorded within the enormous array of antineoliberal — and to some degree anti-capitalist — social movements that now exist. I think we can help magnify the voices of the social and labour movements. But at the same time I think we must also take a constructively critical role, point out the similarities that are often concealed in the differences, attempt syntheses where we can, help build alliances and coalitions, translate (always a difficult task) in sensitive ways what is happening into a more general counterhegemonic, anti-neoliberal and anti-capitalist discourse. Political activists are invariably preoccupied with their immediate tasks and these tasks can sometimes be all-consuming of time, energy and slender resources. But those that I meet in my travels are also hungry for general ideas and perspectives that they can use and that situate what they are doing in a broader context. They do not care for dogma or for arid theoreticism (into which we academics sometimes descend). But they plainly value the opportunity for dialogue, as do I. Out of this, new ways of thinking (theoretically) and acting (practically) are gradually beginning to emerge. I am hopeful for this global movement in formation. REFERENCES Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, David (1969) Explanation in Geography. London: Edward Arnold. Harvey, David (1973) Social Justice and the City. London: Edward Arnold. Harvey, David (1982) The Limits to Capital. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Harvey, David (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Harvey, David (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Harvey, David (2005) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Harvey, David (2006) Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development. London and New York: Verso. Williams, William Appleman (1959) The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. Cleveland, OH, and New York: The World Publishing Company. Alberto Toscano is a lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the author of several articles in social and political theory. His current research focuses on the political history of the concept of fanaticism. He is an editor of the journal Historical Materialism. He can be contacted by e-mail at: a.toscano@gold.ac.uk.