Worth a read. Interview with

Worth a read. Interview with geographer and social theorist David Harvey, professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and one of the 20 most cited humanities scholars of all time. http://www.salon.com/2012/04/28/urban_revolution_is_coming/singleton/ Q. A term that keeps coming up in stories about OWS is the “precariat” (workers involved in either freelance or non-unionized labor). Why are they important to radical movements?A. I’m not too fond of the term “precariat.” It’s always been the case that the people who produce and reproduce urban life look at their condition as being insecure, a lot of it is temporary labor, and have been different from factory workers. The left, historically, has always looked to the trade unions and the factory workers to engage its political base in the age of political change. The left has never thought of the people who are producing and reproducing urban life as being significant. This is where I think the Paris Commune comes in, because if you actually look at who made the Paris Commune, it wasn’t the factory workers. It was artisan workers, and a lot of the labor in Paris at that time was precarious.What you have right now, with the disappearance of many factories, is that you don’t have an industrial working class of the same size and significance that existed in the 1960s and ’70s. So the question becomes, what is the political base of the left? And my argument is to make it all the people who produce and reproduce urban life. Most of those people are precarious, they’re often moving around, they’re not easily organized, hard to unionize, and they’re a shifting population, but nevertheless they have tremendous potential political power….. Q.You say, “The revolution in our times has to be urban.” Why is the left so resistant to that idea? A. I think this is part of the struggle over how you interpret the Paris Commune. Some people say it was an urban social movement and therefore was not a class movement. This comes back to the Marxist/leftist view that the only people who can create a revolutionary movement are factory workers. Well, if you don’t have any factories around, you can’t have a revolution. This is ridiculous.I’m arguing that we have to look at the urban as a class phenomenon. After all, if finance capital is producing the city these days, and it builds the condominiums and it builds the offices, it is producing the city. If we want to resist the way they are doing it, then we have to wage a class struggle, in effect, against their power. I’m very concerned with asking a question like, How do we organize a whole city? The city is where our political future lies on the left. Q. How can public spaces be transformed into more accessible places?A. I look at it in simple terms – there’s a lot of public space in New York City, but there’s very little public space in which you can engage in common activity. Athenian democracy had the agora. Where can we go in New York City, where we can have an agora, and really talk. And this is what the assemblies were trying to define, what the people in Zuccotti Park were trying to do. They made a space where we can have a political dialogue. So we need to take public space… and turn it into a political commons, where real decisions are going to be made, where we can decide if it’s a good idea to have another building project, another bunch of condominiums. Q. Do you think there’s been a growing resistance movement to some of these free-market urban policies?A. What is striking is that if you had a map of protests worldwide which are against aspects of what’s going wrong under capitalism, you would see a huge mass of protests. The difficulty is that a lot of it is fragmented. For example, today we are talking about student debt and all the protests around that. Tomorrow people might be out resisting foreclosures; somebody else might be organizing a protest about the closure of a hospital, or a protest about what’s going on in public education. The difficulty right now is to find some sort of way to connect all of them. There are some attempts to create alliances, like The Right to the City Alliance, and the Excluded Workers Congress, so increasingly people are thinking about how to pull it all together. But it’s in the early stages. If it does all get together, you will find a huge mass of people who are interested in changing the system, root and branch, because this is not satisfying anybody’s real needs or desires. Q. Occupy Wall Street seems to be a coalescence of some of the issues you mentioned, but it still lacks a cohesive message. Why has the left always been so resistant to the idea of leadership, of hierarchy?I think the left has always had a problem, a fetishism of organization, a belief that one kind of organization is sufficient for a particular project. This was true of the communist project, where they followed a democratic-centralist model that they didn’t deviate from at all. And that model had some strengths and certain weaknesses. What we now see are many elements on the left who resist any form of hierarchy. They insist that everything has to be horizontal and openly democratic. Actually it’s not, in practice.In effect Occupy Wall Street was operating as a vanguard movement [a political party at the forefront of a movement]. They’ll deny it, but they were. They were talking for the 99 percent and they were not the 99 percent. They were talking to the 99 percent. There has to be a lot more flexibility on the left in terms of building different organizational structures. I was very impressed by the model of El Alto in Bolivia, where there was a mix of horizontal and hierarchical structures that came together to create a very powerful political organization. I think that the sooner we get away from certain rules of discussion, the better.The current rules of discussion that are currently in vogue are very good for small groups, because you can have an assembly. But if you want to create an assembly that includes the entire population of New York City, you can’t. You have to then think about whether there will be regional assemblies, or a mega-assembly. In fact, Occupy Wall Street does have a coordinating committee. They’re just very nervous about actually taking leadership and organizing.I think the successful movements always have a mix of horizontality and hierarchy. The most impressive one I’ve come across were the Chilean student movements, where one of the leaders was a young communist woman [Camila Vallejo], who is fully open to being as horizontal as possible, rather than having a central committee decide things. But at the same time, when leadership is called for, it should be exercised. If we start to think in these terms, we’ll have a more flexible system of organization on the left. There are groups within Occupy that are trying to get people within the Democratic Party to sign support for Occupy’s demands, and if not, they’re going to run candidates against them. There’s a wing doing that sort of thing, but they’re not the majority at all. Q. At the end of your book, you don’t provide many answers, but you wish to open a dialogue for how to get out of this gross economic inequality and the multiple crises of capitalism. Do you see this coming out of Occupy?A. It could possibly. If the union movement moves toward more geographical forms of organization, and not just based around workplaces, then the alliances between urban social movements and unions would be much, much stronger. What’s interesting is that there’s quite a good history of those types of collaborations that have been quite successful. I think that if you could just plant that seed, a huge change could be possible. If Occupy Wall Street can see their way to more collaboration with the union movement, then there will be a great deal of political action possible. My book is a groundwork for exploring all of these possibilities, and not dismissing anything, because we don’t know what the successful form of organization will be. But there’s a huge space at this moment for political activism.FULL INTERVIEW AT LINKWe in the WSM have promoted the idea of Athenian democracy as participatory. i think when Harvey talks about hierarchy it is perhaps a difficulty with language and terminology. We recognise delegated decision making and obligations of democratic responsibility and maybe that is what he is referring to. We also have said single issues should be united as component parts of a general struggle under the one aspirational umbrella of the socialist movement. We also hope that the trade union movement transcend their work-place struggles and strive for a change in society and not just working conditions. Not really sure where he stands in regard to the rural working class with this emphasis on the city, after all places like India and China are predominantly country-side, village, small town populations. America, too. And has the work-place really disappeared as a centre of organisation? He may be discussing the democratic features of what type of society he is working towards but he shouldn’t over-look the actual production of the goods we need to useand how that should be organised. Which brings us back to the fact that the city can only be seen as part of a regional geography and part of  the world global society