Excerpt: A Brief History of the Anti-Capital World

Original link: http://z.arlmy.me/posts/Note/Note_DavidHarvey_TheAntiCapitalistChronicles/

Excerpt from A Brief History of the Anti-Capitalist World, The Anti-capitalist Chronicles by David Harvey. I saw it in the circle of friends, and it has just been published.

I haven’t read this author, but it seems to be very famous. This is a compilation of some speeches, which is quite easy to read. The content covered is very wide and miscellaneous, and a lot of hidden history is inadvertently mentioned. These are actually more important and worth digging, not just limited to the research results in front of us. In this fast era, we need to go to the source and enter History, into the forest, into the underground, into the heart, back to the body.

There is a sentence that is impressive: the core is the issue of labor and the self-liberation of workers. This has a strong sense of connection with communities, settlements, villages, and common-benefit topics in recent years. The author gently puts forward that we already have the conditions for change, but we are still walking on the old road (being controlled unconsciously), perhaps Ted K has always emphasized that a complete revolution is necessary for change, which has already passed his in-depth thinking.

  • So we have now entered the era of the speculative economy. It is difficult for us to rationally understand the speculative economy as productive activity. But it is also very difficult for us to understand the intricacies of the financial system now. Behind all this, we have seen the emergence of a unique class of investment (such as hedge funds and private equity funds) whose sole purpose is to obtain high investment by any means without any political, social or economic constraints. response rate.
  • I have been using the Koch Brothers as an example symbolizing the capitalist class. I don’t think it is difficult to define the capitalist class and what it means in this day and age, just look at the Koch Brothers. But you can also look at Michael Bloomberg, where things get interesting. The capitalist class can be different in nature, they may all support free markets, free trade, unregulated freedom, privatization, fiscal justice, etc., they are homogenous in these respects, but they also have their own special focus point.
  • When I talk about neoliberalism and the capitalist class, I am not talking about a completely homogeneous capitalist class. There are differences among capitalist classes. Bloomberg supports environmental regulation, but not financial regulation. The Kochs are not in favor of regulation of any kind. The Kochs agree with Bloomberg, who disapproves of spending a large portion of federal funding on protecting the needs of low-income people. Bloomberg disagrees with the Kochs and many others on climate change and gun control, but they agree on the fundamentals of capitalism.
  • There is a configuration of economic power that is meddling in politics, but that configuration is now mired in far-right ethno-nationalist politics, even neo-Nazi politics. The business community continues to provide political support for right-wing policies. But if companies can no longer do so through traditional neoliberal means, as they did in the 1980s and 1990s, or by supporting the authoritarian politics of the 2000s, they may stand ready to support new Fascist politics. My use of the word “fascist” here is valid. I want to remind you that Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini all had ties to big corporations and worked closely with them for a long time while developing their own unique brand: National Socialism.
  • I’m not saying that the transition from neoliberalism to neofascism is inevitable, but I think there are some early warning signs that the neoliberal project is in jeopardy, losing its legitimacy. And those pursuing neoliberal projects in big business are looking for ways to be both popular and supportable. The ruling global oligarchy is very concentrated and very small. For example, Oxfam’s last report on the distribution of wealth stated that the eight richest people control the total wealth held by the poorest 50% of the world’s population. 20 years ago, it was 340 people who had this amount of wealth and power. In a way, the neoliberal project has been too “successful” in pursuing the increasing concentration of wealth and power of the capitalist class.
  • The big question we face now is: How was this concentration of wealth justified, how was it legitimized, and why has it persisted in such a way? Are we really going to tolerate this supposed alliance between neoliberal economics and neofascist political forms? Such alliances are starting to pop up around the world in head-scratching ways. …
  • Fighting corruption, or “draining the swamp,” as we in Washington call it, is becoming a political tactic these days. However, there is a big difference between dealing with corruption and using it as a means to defeat adversaries. But there is no doubt that the means to fight corruption are largely used to weaken the left, not against the right. This is what is happening around the world today.
  • …the way economics is taught in Chinese universities has changed a lot, so if you go to China now, you will find that many economics professors have received their Ph.D.s from universities such as MIT and Stanford. Chinese scholars have a full understanding of neoclassical economics, their methods of analyzing the economy have begun to change, and their economic policies have also begun to change. In China, Marxist political economy is considered a branch of philosophy rather than a category of economics.
  • Almost all successful Internet entrepreneurs in China stand out from the cruelest competition in the world. In their world, speed is an essential quality for entrepreneurs, and imitation and reference are acceptable practices. Market share will try every means. In the Chinese entrepreneurial circle, every day is a trial of blood and fire, just like the fighters in the ancient Roman arena, either you die or I die, and there is no mercy between competitors.
  • …but since 2008, China has made a sudden and aggressive move into high-tech, and for about eight years has positioned itself as a major competitor in the high-tech industry. Four of the top ten high-tech companies in the world are Chinese. The situation was not like this in 2008, this is the development model of China. It’s very fast, very fast, it’s backed by the government, it has scale.
  • So now China is becoming a world power, and if it does become a world power, China is where AI will shine because the Chinese have decided that AI is the future. So, what is artificial intelligence about? It is finding a way to remove as much labor as possible from the production process. And that’s where I think the biggest question is: what’s going to happen to the workforce?
  • In 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected president, there is a wonderful clip that can be used as an example. This could be a wild story. Bill Clinton had just been elected president and was beginning to outline his economic plan. The most famous of Clinton’s economic advisers was Robert Rubin (Robert Rubin), who came from the top investment bank-Goldman Sachs. Robert Rubin looked at Clinton and said, “You can’t execute this economic plan.” Clinton asked, “Why not?” Rubin said, “Wall Street won’t let you do that.” According to legend, Clinton said this: ” My entire economic plan, and whether or not I get re-elected, depends on a bunch of goddamn Wall Street bond traders?” And Rubin’s obvious answer was, “Yes.” Clinton came into office promising universal health care and all kinds of good things things, but what did he give us in the end? He gave us NAFTA. He reformed our welfare system and strengthened the punitive nature of it. He introduced reforms to the criminal justice system, which advanced mass incarceration. He gave us the WTO, and at the end of his term he repealed the Glass-Steagall Act, the last firewall regulating investment banks. In other words, he implemented the complete economic plan that Goldman Sachs had long wanted. After the Clinton period, most of the U.S. treasury ministers came from Goldman Sachs. This is an important sign that bondholders determine what can be done within the realm of state power.
  • …but if you go to Greece and ask people there whether it is the government or the bondholders who control the affairs of the country, you will get a very different answer. If you keep asking: “after 2011, who forced you to accept all these austerity policies? Who has absolute control over here?” the answer is of course bondholders and socialism under the control of Syriza government. This government bowed to financial interests at critical moments, implementing the measures bondholders demanded.
  • (The shopping block) It’s all about manipulating one’s needs and desires, all for the construction of capital imagery. This is what Marx called the factory system. He said that the establishment of the factory system was not to reduce the burden of labor. In fact, he commented on the views of John Stuart Mill at the beginning of Machinery and Large-scale Industry. Marx discusses why Mill fails to understand that machines that are supposed to ease the burden of labor actually end up making the labor process more and more oppressive. We can say the same about Hudson Yards. As it stands, capital builds things that, to a casual observer, should be used to improve people’s quality of life. But now these things are in fact only symbolic demonstrations of the nature of contemporary capital. This is a symbolic intervention, not a real one. Some people will live in Hudson Yards, but housing prices there certainly have nothing to do with affordable housing. For the top 1% of the top 10% of the affluent population, most of the housing in Hudson Yards is pretty good quality. You ask yourself, “What would happen if we used all the resources that went into making this place to build the affordable housing that New York desperately needs? What kind of city would we be living in?” Also, if we put so much What will happen if our efforts are used to create the possibility of consumer choice, such as creating different lifestyles and ways of being?
  • These rolling spatial fixes, from the United States to Japan, from Japan to China, from China to Central Asia and Africa—this is the geopolitical manifestation of the logic of compound growth of capital. We have to be very careful about geography because these issues sparked two world wars in the 20th century. Both wars involved geopolitical competition. I’m not saying there’s bound to be a world war or anything like that, I’m just saying that we need to analyze very carefully the geopolitical competition and the role of theory. It would be foolish to ignore them…
  • …I want people to come to Hudson Yards and bring civilization and make it a completely different thing. However, the private interest groups that now manage such spaces often prohibit the frenetic behavior that makes spaces fun in the name of safety and social control.
  • People really do have control over their social spaces and give it style. At a time when capital is merely promoting involuntary forms of consumerism, it is the crowd that makes the greatest contribution to the meaning of the city.
  • …In other words, what we want is for people to have some kind of autonomy over how their time is used and spent. But the possibility of this autonomy is gradually diminished as capital invades everyday life. Capital deprives us of our autonomy over our own time, making it impossible for most people to reach the “beyond the realm of necessity.” That said, the fact that most people are struggling to get the necessities of life means that their ability and time to express themselves is very limited. Cities are at their best when social groups have a great deal of social autonomy to do what they want in their own way. Yet, time and time again, we have seen the erosion, deprivation, and removal of people’s technology and ability to live autonomously and freely.
  • …the feudal order was also undermined by usury. Moneylenders are very good at taking land, so, if you put moneylenders and merchant capitalists together, they destroy feudal power. This makes possible the accumulation and concentration of money capital in the hands of a very small number of people who then use this accumulated capital to deprive the masses of all productive assets. Marx’s story of primitive accumulation boils down to the story of the formation of a working class: people without any means of subsistence or life other than selling their labor power on the labor market.
  • This is the story Marx wanted to tell. Maybe he was exaggerating a bit, but on the other hand, when we look back, we find that a lot of things happened in history like he said. He categorically dismisses the religious story as utterly hypocritical. If you want to understand how religious people really behave, look no further than how Christian parishes are organized, how the poor are treated in workhouses and orphanages, and so on. They built prisons and established a politics of incarceration (which continues to this day). Their violent repression of the homeless and the trampling of human dignity, and with it the Christian way of dealing with unemployment and poverty.
  • Industrial capitalists appear in different ways. They base themselves on the existence of landed estates and wage labor, but gain monetary power and start using it to make more money. This is the origin of capital.
  • The rule is this: from distributing benefits among capitalists according to the amount of labor they employ, to distributing benefits according to the capital they invest. As a result, subsidies flow from labor-intensive forms of production and economies to capital-intensive firms and economies. This transfer of value arises from the competition of profit rates in the market, which is the result of a perfectly competitive market and one of Marx’s most important discoveries.
  • Free trade is not fair trade at all.
  • …China has long relied on a labor-intensive economy, but it is transitioning to a capital-intensive one. If China did so, there would be less value transfer from Chinese subsidies to capital-intensive economies in Europe and the United States. There is a battle going on between Trump and China over intellectual property and technology. Technology is of course the servant of capital-intensive economies. The U.S. is trying to prevent the transfer of technological knowledge to China so that China remains a labor-intensive economy from which the U.S. can profit. But China can no longer be labor-intensive, partly because of demographics—they have a labor shortage, and partly because of other factors related to the nature of the market.
  • In the 1960s, labor’s main problem came from immigration, which was used to try to undermine labor laws and labor productivity. This has led to the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment in many working-class movements in Europe and even in the United States. Of course, we are now seeing a resurgence of that sentiment to a large extent. However, in the 1970s, capital controls were suddenly lifted and capital began to move freely from one part of the world to another. The removal of barriers to capital controls, combined with lower transportation costs and improved communications, has made capital highly mobile. Finally, especially after the 1980s, we start to see the leveling out of the rate of profit becoming more and more pronounced.
  • Alienation has powerful subjective consequences. It is hard to imagine productive workers actively supporting labor when they feel alienated. The subjective feeling of alienation makes workers separate the satisfaction they get from labor from the labor itself. This is not to say that workers do not have any sense of satisfaction in their work. The labor process can be organized by the workers themselves to make the whole process interesting, so as to give workers a sense of personal worth.
  • Capital cannot freely choose what its production technology should be; capital cannot freely choose what labor conditions are imposed on laborers when they enter the factory gate.
  • …the emergence of satisfactory work structures seems increasingly unlikely.
  • All the forms of alienation described in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 we find in Capital, but they are now integrated into the scientific understanding of capital accumulation. Both laborers and capitalists are alienated , driven by abstractions and the laws of operation of capital that are fetishized and materialized by the ruling concepts of the ruling class. This is part of the story of alienation, and we need to recognize that it’s even more important in today’s world. This is the source of much dissatisfaction in today’s society.
  • Capital controls ruling thought by controlling the media, ensuring that capital is the last to be blamed.
  • In addition, by doing so, GM has thrown away all the community, and the common resources that have been established through social relations, social provision structures, and so on. There must be some better way to transform. Of course, it is almost certain that this approach is not acceptable to capital. Capitalists continue to do things the same way. GM has no loyalty to their workers, the company gives everything to the shareholders and the CEO. To guarantee big dividends and a big CEO salary, it destroys a functioning workforce, a community and the entire fabric of social relations, leaving nothing but a dire future. With job losses, a loss of identity and meaning in life, and a growing sense of alienation, Ohio has become an opioid epidemic. This is what is at the root of what is destroying Ohio communities.
  • In order to change the current environment, you need to have a good grasp of what the nature of capitalist society is. But Marx was well aware that the revolutionary project must focus on the self-liberation of the workers. The “self” in this statement is important. Any significant move to change the world requires a transformation of the self, so workers must transform themselves too.
  • In The Outline of a Critique of Political Economy, Marx discusses at length the problems of technological change and the technical dynamism inherent in capitalism. What he is making clear is that, by definition, a capitalist society will invest heavily in innovation and invest heavily in building new technologies and structuring promising projects. The reason for this is that when an individual capitalist competes with other capitalists, if his technology is superior to his competitors, he will obtain excess profits. Thus, each capitalist has an incentive to seek technologies that are more productive than those of his competitors. For this reason, technological dynamism is built into the core of capitalist society. Marx recognized this when he wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848. It is also one of the main dynamics of permanent revolution in capitalism. It will never be satisfied with existing technology. It will constantly seek to improve, because capitalism will always reward individuals, companies or societies with more advanced technology. The country, nation or power group with the most advanced and dynamic technology will lead the way. The dynamism of technology is thus built within the global structure of capitalism. It has been that way from the beginning.
  • The dynamism of capitalist society thus relies heavily on constant innovation driven by science and technology to create new businesses. Marx saw this clearly in his own time. He wrote it all in 1858! But now, for us at the moment, this question has become crucial. The contemporary version of the problem Marx discussed is the problem of artificial intelligence. We now need to know to what extent artificial intelligence has developed with the development of science and technology, and to what extent it is and may be applied to the production process in the future. The obvious consequence of using AI is that it displaces laborers. In fact, it will further disarm and devalue laborers in terms of their ability to apply imagination, skill and expertise in the production process.
  • In the passage I quoted from Marx’s pamphlet on the Paris Commune, at the heart is the question of labor and the self-emancipation of the laborer .
  • This form of surplus labor time is what Marx called surplus value, and who gets it is a problem. The problem pointed out by Marx is not that surplus value cannot be obtained, but that surplus value cannot be obtained by labor. Although the tendency of capital “on the one hand to create free time”, but on the other hand “to turn this free time into surplus labor” for the benefit of capitalists. It could have been applied to the emancipation of the laborer, but it was not. In fact, it was used to nest for the bourgeoisie, within which to accumulate wealth through traditional means. So this is the central contradiction.
  • Rather than saying that we all want to go back to work, get back those jobs that were lost, and restore everything to how it was before the crisis started, maybe we should say, why don’t we create a completely different social order in this crisis? Why don’t we take what our current collapsing capitalist society has conceived, such as amazing science and technology and production capacity, and unleash artificial intelligence, technological change and organizational forms, etc., to create something that has never been seen before? After all, in times of emergency like this one, we are already experimenting with alternative systems — providing basic free food supplies, free medical care, access to internet resources, and so on to poor and affected communities and groups. In fact, the outlines of a new socialist society have emerged, which is perhaps why the right and the capitalist class are so desperate to get us back where we were.
  • This is the point that Marx made again and again. Contrary to the false individualism constantly preached in bourgeois ideology, the real root of individual freedom, autonomy and liberation should be that all our (reasonable) needs are met. We only have to work 6 hours a day, and the rest of the time we do exactly what we like. And this will take collective action. In other words, isn’t this an interesting moment when we can really think about the possibility of building an alternative vibrant society? But in order to embark on such a liberating path, we must first liberate ourselves so that we can see new imaginings alongside new realities.

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