on why struggles over urban space matter_ an interview with david harvey

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[David Harvey]

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Why do urban struggles matter in projects of social

change? What is the importance of reclaiming public

space in social movements? And at this gloomy global

moment of extreme urban disparities and social

inequalities, how do we re-think what is possible? For

insights on these questions, we interviewed David

Harvey on 24 October 2013. Harvey is the

Distinguished Professor of Anthropology &

Geography at the Graduate Center of the City

University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center

for Place, Culture and Politics, and author of

numerous groundbreaking books including Social

Justice and the City(1973), The Limits to Capital

(1982), Spaces of Hope(2000),A Brief History of

Neoliberalism(2005), and Rebel Cities: From the

Right to the City to the Urban Revolution(2012). In this

interview, Harvey illustrates how struggles over urban

space and the quality of daily life in neighborhoods areintrinsic to understanding the dynamics of class struggle. He highlights the importance of joining struggles in projects of

social change and calls for re-conceptualizing of the working class to include all those people who produce and

reproduce urban life. The original interview was recorded, and subsequently transcribed by Duncan Wane.

Hiba Bou Akar and Nada Moumtaz (HB & NM): Professor Harvey, we are very honored and grateful for this

opportunity to conduct an interview with you for Jadaliyya. Our first question is the following: for people and

movements interested in social and political change, why is the struggle over urban space (or space and its

production in general) significant in bringing about social change?

David Harvey (DH):I will give you a simple theoretical background, which comes out of my readings and writings on

Volume Two of Capital. The simple general argument that Marx makes is that surplus value, profit, is produced in the

act of production. Of course Volume One of Capital, which is the one that everyone reads, is all about production. Buteven in Volume One, Marx makes it clear that there can be no value in what has been produced until that value is

realized in the market. Therefore, as he says in the Grundrisse, it is contradictory unity between production and

realization that actually defines what capital is about.

Now, if you think about this, you can see that production creates surplus value, but you can also see that the value is

not necessarily realized at the point where it is producedthe value is realized somewhere else. For example, value can

be produced in a Chinese factory, and then realized by Wal-Mart in Columbus, Ohio. So, urbanization is, in many ways,

a field of realization of surplus value. There is an inner connectivity in the circulation of capital between production and

realization, and struggles in the urban sphere are just as important to value production and realization as are struggles

in the workplace.

Nov 15 2013by Hiba Bou Akar and Nada Moumtaz
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Now, the workers can struggle for higher wages and better working conditions, and perhaps they succeed in the

production process. But, from their standpoint, they then take their extra money, they return home, and they find that

they suddenly have to pay it backto the bourgeoisie in the form of higher rents, credit card charges, telephone bills,

and so on. So, from the standpoint of the worker, there is a concern not simply with what happens at the point of

production, but also with how much housing costs, and how much you pay for goods and services, commodities in the

shops, hidden charges from paying interest on mortgages, and all the rest of it.

So, I construe these two forms of class struggle, which in a lot of theories are kept strictly apart, as being a

contradictory unity. Therefore, the struggles that go on in cities over daily life are just as important as the struggles

going on in workplaces. That unity has always been very important to me, although a lot of people prefer not toacknowledge it.

This, then, affects how cities are shaped, what the costs of living are, how rent sorts income streams to spaces, and

how ghettoization occurs. Here, we should talk about ghettoization, historically of the poor, but now of the rich, who are

forming ghettos for themselves and closing themselves off from the world.

So, I see this as a single unitary problem, albeit there is what I call contradictory unity between what happens at the

point of production and what happens in the living space. Now, my point is that you could have actually immense

victories at the point of production, and then it would all be lost back in the living space. Workers are agitated by rising

rentsand, we can see this right now, actually, if we look at capital in generalextracting surpluses back from workers

through high rent accommodations, telephone charges, and so on.

This is important for me when teaching students. I can teach them theoretically about the workplace, but most students

are not in the workplace. But, if you start talking about the rents they pay, then they understand exactly what you are

talking about. You tell them they are fighting about the same things, and thereby playing the game of class struggle.

For me, the struggles over urban space and the quality of daily life in the neighborhood are just as vital to

understanding the dynamics of what class struggle is all about. The incredible thing about capital, of course, is its

extreme flexibility: if it loses here, it gains there. We had a period under social democracy when it lost some power in

the workplace, and it tried to suck back as much of the surplus as it could through these other mechanisms. I think it is

unfortunate that in many modes of thinking, including the Marxist tradition, what happens in the living space is

considered a secondary issue. Capital is very happy if everyone thinks it is a secondary point, because then that realm

is not approached as part of the dynamic of class struggle. For me, that contradictory unity between production and

realization is significant in how you think about the relationship between the production of value, and surplus value, and

its realization.

Of course, one of the problems of Marxist theory is that no one reads Volume Two of Capital about the realization

process. Everyone will tell you about the production process, but nobody discusses the realization process. Volume

Two is a very difficult book to read, but missing that piece is the reason, I think, that there is a serious shortcoming in

radical analyses that do not see the unity between production and realization.

HB & NM: While in Istanbul the urban roots of the Gezi Park uprisings were more highlighted, those of the

Arab uprisings are less evidenteven though in Egypt, for instance, the housing crisis and the impossibility

of young adults to secure housing to start families have been rampant problems. How would you

characterize the difference in locating the urban crisis in these two uprisings?

DH:Well, I am not an expert on Istanbul or on Cairo, so I have to say it is very embarrassing being the worlds expert

on things I know nothing about. Having said that, I was in Istanbul just before the uprising and, of course, I knew

enough about Istanbul to see that it was undergoing an astonishing process of urban redevelopment. There were

construction cranes everywhere! The Turkish economy is the second-fastest growing economy in the world, and

construction and urbanization, of course, play a part in how it grows. But, this is a bubble and, in the course of a

bubble, people get displaced. I became very unpopular because I went on the radio there, and told them it reminded me

of Madrid in 2005 before the crash. There were a lot of struggles against displacement going on in Istanbul. I was very

fortunate to have some colleagues there who took me to various parts of the city, showing me where the gentrification

and the evictions were happening.


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It seemed to me that, in this situation, the urban-social movements were clearly distressed. There was a lot of agitation

against these mega-projects, which the government had designed for the city. When they announced the plans for the

square, I was not surprised at all that there was some sort of reaction to it. But, as far as I could tell, the reaction did not

possess the same kind of center as in Egypt and in North Africa generally. In North Africa, the background to many of

the struggles had been recurring food riots that have taken place over the last fifteen to twenty years. The high cost of

food has been a serious question, but the populations also see massive increases in inequality emerging around them;

there is clearly a great deal of corruption.

My first thought when the Arab uprisings occurred in Cairo was how similar it was to Paris during the French Revolution

of 1848. Paris 1848 and Cairo now have interesting parallels. In Paris in 1848, the people decided to get rid of the king,Louis Philippe. They got rid of the king, but that was the easy part. These were called the February Days of the 1848.

The equivalent would the 25 January (2011) uprisings in Egypt, which ended with the overthrow of Mubarak. In Paris, a

few months later, during the June Days of 1848, facing workers rebellion, order was restored by a military apparatus,

and the rebellion was crushed. In the Parisian case, this knowledge of how to handle people was brought back to

France from Algeria, which was a French colony. The military apparatus treated the people on the boulevards as

colonial subjects and shot them down. That was the end of that uprising. What happened after 30 June 2013, on 3 July

in Egypt, bore an uncanny resemblance to the June Days, with repression imposed by the military. In Cairo, however, it

was not a socialist revolution; it was more of a bourgeois republican revolution with the aim of getting rid of corruption

and inequality, trying to create a more democratic society. I am not sure how useful the parallel is, how far I could push

it.

There was also a clear alliance of forces, which emerged in Cairo, and this might have some parallels with Istanbul.Workers movements turned out in Cairothey had also been agitating for some time. So, there was a workers

movement which joined in, there was the obvious discontented youth movement, and there was the city population who

was discontented with inequality, high food prices, and corruption. But, the alliance in Cairo was quite disparate, and I

think the same thing applied to Istanbul. For instance, in Istanbul, soccer fans of the working class club [Beikta]

joined in. They were chanting sexist slogans, which the feminists objected to. They told them they should change their

slogans, and they actually did. So, in both cases, there was a disparate alliance with the focus of discontent on a

regime that operates in a very autocratic way, and will not stand for any kind of consultation. I would not say that either

of these were socialist revolutions. They are urban uprisings around discontent.

Within Istanbuland this is a classic case where the parallel with Paris is significantthe Turkish central government

does not like Istanbul. Istanbul is the center of opposition, as are the other major urban centers. So, while the

government itself is not really anti-urban because they favor this sort of urban developmentalism, they are certainly not

in favor of the populations who predominate in those areas.

HB & NM: But, one cannot put the discontent with Erdoan on par with the discontent with Mubarak?

DH:Well, in both cases, it is authoritarianism that people are standing up against, and so are levels of corruption

extremely high in both instances. These are regimes founded on some level of corruption. I am not saying corruption

does not exist in places like the United States, the only difference is that, in the United States, it is legal [referring to the

legally sanctioned financing of political campaigns by corporations, associations, and political action committees].

HB & NM: The parallels (or the lack of) between the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and the Arab

uprisings are still being debated. While some participants of the OSW claim the movement was inspired by

the Arab uprisings, others saw the conditions of the two movements different and hence incomparable. How

do you see the difference between OWS and the Arab uprisings in terms of the disparities and social

inequalities that exist in each context?

DH:My impression of the Arab Spring is a broadly populist movement bringing together all kinds of discontents

against a ruling regime that was seen as insensitive. I am not deeply familiar with OWS because I was on sabbatical

that year. I left and, ten days later, they occupied Wall Street.

If you look at the composition of the people who were involved in the OWS movement, it was nowhere near the same

as diverse as the composition of the population that appeared in Tahrir Square or even in Gezi Park. It was a small

group, ideologically very strongly driven by anarchist and autonomist thinking. It was people who had a radical agenda,


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public to do what it likes. Public space is regulated space, which is not there for a common purpose. Here is a new

emphasis now in the city on the question of the commons: are there common spaces where we can actually assemble?

The other thing that was remarkable about Occupy was how quickly the police repression came. We have an

analogous movement on the right wing, the Tea Party. Last week, the Tea Party pulled down the barriers around the

World War II monument in Washington, took the rails, and dumped them in front of the White House. The police did not

do a single thing. But, if you move one inch in Zuccotti Park [the privately-owned public space that was the center of

the OWS protests in New York City] you get immediately arrested. I think that this disparity in who gets arrested by the

police is now coming to public attention. I think that the struggles over these symbolic spaces are an important part of

the tactics of the left.

HB & NM: For Marxist geographers, changes in the production of the urban condition (capitalist, neoliberal,

etc.) are necessary for social justice. Yet, many other theorists and activists remain focused on struggles in

the workplace. Did the Occupy or the Arab uprisings refocus the attention of class struggle on the urban

condition?

DH:You have to put the two together. If you change the workplaces and not the city, at some point you have to wonder

what the aim is. If people are living in appalling housing conditions, without affordable accommodation, if people are

homeless even if they have jobs, then fighting, and even winning battles in the workplace will get you nowhere if the

city is a declining mess. These issues are now coming up, for example, in the bankruptcy of Detroit. This is a key

aspect of what our struggles should be about, and it is very strange to me that few people think about this as a unity of

struggles.

Ideologically, the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, which is one of the stronger left parties in Europe, is worker- and

factory-based, yet one of its most successful actions was over the poll tax, which was an urban issue. That was the

issue that got rid of Margaret Thatcher. To the degree that the Party were effective in politics, it was actually through

an urban issue the reform of local government financing that they made a huge difference.

I found a wonderful old statement from Gramsci that goes back to 1918, who was of course very militant in favor of

workers councils, which states that the workers councils are just interested in what happens in that particular line of

work. It is very important that the workers councils be supplemented by neighborhood organizations because

neighborhood organizations, insofar as they incorporate the street cleaners, the transport workers, and the bank clerks,

and everybody else, have a better understanding of the conditions of the working class as a whole, than do the

workers councils that only have some ideas about their own particular lines of industrial production. Gramsci said:

Lets put these two forms of organization together. I think that has basically been my politics all along, but I keep on

emphasizing the urban because most of my leftist colleagues in the Marxist and Socialist movements just want to

emphasize production and workers movement, rather than look at the conditions of the working class in the city as a

whole.

HB & NM: Henri Lefebvre, you, and other Marxist geographers have discussed how cities and the built

environment in general are sites of capital accumulation, mostly by dispossession, with soaring land and

housing prices that are increasingly pushing the working class and poor people in many cities of the world

out of the wayout to the peripheries, or into ghettos and slums. What are some conceptual possibilities that

could help us move forward in social struggles over the built environment?

DH:Yes, but even without the way in which the city is a field for the accumulation of capital, it is also a field for the

realization of capital, and you need to put these struggles together. Although, like you are saying, Lefebvre, myself,

and others have been saying that there is this secondary circuit of capital where money flows into city-building. Making

the city is as important as making widgets in a factory. We do not look enough at who makes the city and how it is

made. In these days, the work forces are often casual and temporary they move around, they are hard to organize.

Because of the degree to which factory labor has been decimated, many people wonder Where is the working class?

The response to that is we should conceptualize the working class as all those people who produce and reproduce

urban life.

HB & NM: Any other comments or questions to all the activists out there?


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DH: No, I have a rule, which is to never give advice to local activists about their local situation, because they know

what they are doing far more than I do!

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: If you prefer, email your comments to [email protected].

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Alex Gordon University of Bristol

Interesting article, marred only by DH's confus ion about the British SWP tow ards the end. The SWP

isn't "one of the stronger left parties in Europe" (at least not in comparison w ith genuine mass left

parties suc h as the Portuguese or Greek Communist Parties, the French 'Lef t Front', or the German

'Left Party'), it isn't "worker- and fac tory-bas ed" and hasn't been for a long time, and defeating the poll

tax w asn't "one of its most successf ul actions". DH is probably conf using the SWP w ith the Militant

Tendency - now the Socialist Party, w hich did advocate a community-based, non-payment campaign

consistently from the introduction in Scotland in 1989 to the defeat of the tax in 1990, through the All-

Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation). The protest called by the A BAPTF in Trafalgar Square, London, on 31

March 1990, attracted more than 200,000 protesters . Labour MP, Terry Fields (a Militant Tendency

supporter) w as jailed for 60 days f or refusing to pay his poll tax. The SWP by contras t had a rather

complicated relationship w ith the A nti-Poll Tax Federation, from time to time vehemently criticising the

non-payment campaign for being too community-based and c ounter-posing a tac tic of calling on local

government wor kers through their unions to boycott collection of the tax.

Reply ike

November 16 at 8:27am5

Ayca Alemdaroglu

Great interview . Thank you HB and NM

Reply ike November 15 at 9:46pm3

Khalid Mustafa Me dani Bonn International School

Great Interview . Thanks very much.

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