David Harvey Interview
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http://www.redpepper.org.uk/david-harvey-interview-the-importance-of-postcapitalist-imagination/
" You look at each one of them like, for instance, the use and exchange value contradiction and say – ‘the alternative world would be one where we deliver use values’. So we concentrate on use values and try to diminish the role of exchange values…
… So we’ve got to change the monetary system – either tax away any surpluses people are beginning to get or come up with a monetary system which dissolves and cannot be stored, like air miles……What happens right now is that we produce things and then we try to persuade consumers to consume whatever we’ve produced, whether they really want it or need it. Whereas we should be finding out what people’s basic wants and desires are and then mobilising the production system to produce that. By eliminating the exchange value dynamic you can reorganise the whole system in a different kind of way…"I went to the talk yesterday at the Anarchist Bookfair by the Wine & Cheese Appreciation Society on "Don't read Marx with Harvey". I had expected a criticism of his underconsumptionism or his Keynesianism or something like that, but the criticism was more fundamental. They handed out a sheet containing the following statement made by Harvey at a meeting in New York last 14 November in which he talked of an alternative money:
Quote:Representation of value in the money form is a perversion of what value is about, it's a contradiction.[…] What this would suggest is that if you want to prevent class formation, if you want to prevent the individual appropriation of social value, then you would have to come up with a money form that is anti accumulation. Marx says that gold and silver are the money commodities because they are not oxidisable. […] They maintain their character. You can accumulate value, social power. And we see what happens in societies… But if you had a money form that dissolved, that is oxidisable, we would end up with a very different kind of society. You would have a money form that would aid circulation but that would not facilitate accumulation.This apparent advocacy of an "oxidizable money" has become a standing joke in some circles and has completely discredited Harvey in their eyes — as, if true, it should. A video of Harvey stating this can be found here:http://vimeo.com/53579139#t=1h55m19sThe speaker's case was that this showed that Harvey had not understood that in the opening chapters of Capital Marx was criticising the whole concept of exchange, of producers working separately and then exchanging their products to get what they needed to live, and that this had led him to think that Marx was objecting only to money that could be accumulated but not to one that couldn't be.Unfortunately, it was presented as Harvey misunderstanding the difference between "socially necessary labour" and "abstract labour". This may be the case but the point would have been clearer if the speaker had simply said that, as Harvey was speaking of a new form of money that could not be accumulated, he had completely misunderstood Marx who clearly held that the end of capitalism meant the end of exchange, money and value.If Harvey really does advocate an "oxidizable money" then he will join the long line of people who are quite good at putting over Marx's criticism but are hopeless when it comes to the alternative to capitalism (as were those historians who were very good at applying to the materialist conception of history to the past but had a blind spot when it came to the USSR).
ALB wrote:Harvey wrote:But if you had a money form that dissolved, that is oxidisable, we would end up with a very different kind of society. You would have a money form that would aid circulation but that would not facilitate accumulation.But surely 'money' represents an 'exploitative relationship', not an 'aid to circulation'?To maintain an 'oxidisable' exploitative relationship would be to just get rid of a fixed ('not oxidisable') exploitative relationship, and replace it with… errr… a constantly regenerating exploitative relationship.Money is for individual exchange. Surely we'll have a social economy, production for free use by all, with no need to exchange money?If we need to estimate the worth of, or time taken to make, or materials required for, any social production, surely we'll just ask the direct producers for an estimate of worth, time or materials, and make decisions collectively as to how to expend resources, if there are differences of priorities?Is Harvey a Communist, or just a "neutral" [sic] academic and commentator?
Critisticuffs have now published this talk as an article:http://critisticuffs.org/texts/david-harvey/It criticises Harvey's proposal for an "oxidisable money", i.e for money which cannot be accumulated. How someone who has written extensively on what Marx is supposed to have been can end up advocating monetary reform is incredible.
LBirdian Economics of the Non-Elite VarietyWrong. Money is a means of circulation. Circulation of money is a necessary function of cyclic capitalist reproduction. Wrong. Money does not represent exploitation. Profit, the phenomenal form of surplus value, represents exploitation.Money represents value as a repository of socially necessary labour time. If money represented exploitation, no-one would touch it with a barge pole.Wrong. Money is not for individual exchange. Value, as socially necessary labour time ipso facto can only be social. Money is essential for social exchange. It is through social exchange that surplus socially necessary labour time is realized as surplus value in the phenomenal form of profit.Wrong. As for estimating the worth of an individual product, you ignominiously retreat back into a social formation that precedes capitalism.It is you who needs to be educated before you start educating the working class from above it. You are a total fraud. Harvey’s “oxidizable money” is about on equal par with your “democratic truth”.
So, you're an expert on economics, as well as science, eh, twc?Is there no end to your erudition? It's such a shame that no-one ever seems to know just what you're actually talking about. Long, opaque posts, with no answers to questions posed.I'll tell you what, since you seem to be 'The Expert' on everything, and you certainly wouldn't put 'economics' or 'science' to the test of democracy, why don't we just put you in charge of society, and let you get on with telling the rest of us what to do?That solution would fit nicely with your own politics, too, wouldn't it?If you're representative of the SPGB's thinking in any way, I'm going back to the church.
My politics are World Socialist.That means I am a nondescript member of a leaderless, democratic, socialist party, that has always stood against leadership into socialism. It has held a political stance against leaders, and leadership into socialism, for over a century. It is simply unlike the anti-democratic Left.I have never been a leader of, or managed, a single person throughout my working career, on socialist principle, by genuine disinclination and distaste of the very obnoxious thing. That comes from growing up in an open world-socialist household.On the other hand, I have been always managed and led by other people, lately much younger and inexperienced than myself. That conforms to my inherited socialist views against preferment under capitalism if it involves the subjugation of my working fellows, which it almost invariably does.My knowledge simply comes from a lifetime interest in reading everything I could on socialism, just like many other members do. There is a natural division of labour in this, and folks complement each other.You may consider my socialist stance, at work in a dog-eat-dog capitalist workplace, to be absurdly self denying. In a capitalist rational sense that would be correct. But I cannot bring myself, emotionally, to do otherwise.You have chosen the wrong person, and the wrong Party, to hurl charges of leadership at.
"I never managed, a single person throughout my working career, on socialist principle.." My reason is that nobody ever listened to what i told them Now it's still the same as a socialist …still no-one listens to what i say.
twc wrote:My knowledge simply comes from a lifetime interest in reading everything I could on socialism…The bit you've missed is 'critically', twc. For a socialist, it should be '…in critically reading…'.You simply regurgitate texts. You don't discuss them, which would require a critical turn of mind, and an open admission of one's critical viewpoint, the stance or perspective one takes when applying criticism to a text.I've tried to help.
So you, in your ignorance, imagine that I'm regurgitating texts. I challenge you to substantiate this claim.I will not honour your critical thinking charge with anything but the contempt deserved by the haughty.
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Message received from Critisticuffs in relation to a workshop they are organising on 17 April:
Quote:David Harvey is the dominant commentator on Capital in English and many Capital reading groups use his video lectures or his book – A Companion to Marx' Capital – to guide them. Capital can be a daunting book and David Harvey's commentaries have encouraged many to pick it up and work through it. This, in principle, is a valuable project as much can be learned about the world we are forced to live in from that old book. Yet, those who read A Companion to guide them through Capital in order to learn about the capitalist mode of production will be disappointed: it neither gives an adequate account of what Marx said nor of the capitalist mode of production. In this meeting we want to focus on A Companion's failure to grasp what value and the value forming activity – abstract labour – are. /A Companion/ does not inform the reader what value is – access power to social wealth – and has nothing to say about labour being reduced to pure toil – “expenditure of human brains, muscles, nerves, hands” (Capital, p.134). Instead it exclusively concerns itself with the magnitude of value, i.e. for how much a commodity exchanges. Hence, Marx's charge against political economy also applies to his most prominent commentator: “Political economy has indeed analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and has uncovered the content concealed within these forms. But it has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value and why the measurement of labour by its duration is expressed in the magnitude of value of the product.” (Capital, p.132) All this might seem like a scholastic exercise by people who care about old books instead of, say, the poverty all around us. However, it is important to highlight these problems not because they misrepresent Marx, although this is often the case, but because we think that David Harvey's account in A Companion does not adequately explain the commodity, money and capital; in short capitalism. Harvey's failure to grasp these fundamental concepts is the premise for him proposing futile solutions to socially made poverty. When David Harvey proposes oxidisable money against accumulation this does not only reveal his ignorance of money but also and more fundamentally of commodity production and the poverty it entails. The purpose of our workshop is hence not so much to point out that David Harvey wrote a bad book, but to encourage people to pick up a copy of Capital in order to understand the misery all around us.Harvey’s work is well worth a read for those already acquainted with Marxian economics. But, as with all ‘introductions’ or guides to Marx, Harvey’s work is the guidance of an individual with a certain axe to grind. Harvey is not the worst of these, and if guides to Marx inspire people to go and read Capital or other works then all well and good. But, of course, they generally don’t. Guides and introductions stand as texts in their own right and an (mis)understanding of Marx is grasped through them. I suspect this is true, too, of the many introductions of Marx’s writings written by eminent academics, many of which are hostile to Marx (take AJP Taylor’s and G. Stedman Jones’s introductions to the Communist Manifesto). Marx is too important to be left to the academics. His work needs to be read independently of the abstract and abstruse academic struggles which have tended to monopolise debate about his ideas. Today, most of the thinking about Marx and his relevance is not coming up from working-class politics but down from academics, mostly in the US. Hence we end up discussing the fantasy politics of oxidisable currency. Marx’s work is often hard going but today, more than 150 years after Marx first began writing about the materialist conception of history, his ideas still remain the starting point for understanding capitalism and how to end it. So much baggage has been collected along the way that, for the next generation in working class politics, it is probably necessary to start again from the beginning. One historian of socialism (Joseph Clayton), hostile to the SPGB, once wrote that it was committed to ‘Marx, the whole Marx and nothing but Marx’. Now, as then, it might not be a bad place to start.
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