excerpts from an interview with *David Harvey* ** *Q: One of the categories you’ve developed explicitly in your last two books is the idea of “accumulation by dispossession.” What is it, and how does it fit into this whole discussion of Iraq, and even beyond? *
A: Accumulation by dispossession is about plundering, robbing other people of their rights. When we start to look at what has happened to the global economy <http://www.samsharif.com/> for the past thirty years, a lot of that has been going on all over the place. In some instances, it is taking away peoples rights to dispose of their own resources, so you will find that there is resistance to that in the Middle East. Then for instance, one of the big issues behind the Zapatista movement was the control of resources. One of the big issues in Bolivia right now is the control of natural resources. Capitalism is very much about taking away the rights people have over their natural resources. But it is not only natural resources when we are talking about dispossession. If you look at what is happening to people’s pension funds, it is the taking away of rights. And you take a look at the world andsome people are getting extremely rich right now. How are they getting rich? Are they getting rich because they are contributing to a global economy in productive ways or are they getting rich because they are taking away other people’s rights? If you look at the history of things such as Enron and you see that a lot of wealth is being accumulated in the world right now by dispossessing others of their rights and their wealth and it could be natural resources as in Iraq, or in Bolivia or Chiapas, or it could be rights which have been accumulated through pension funds and so on. You could look at something like eminent domain in this country right now, something that is now being used to take away people’s property so the developers of Wal-Mart can build a new store or a shopping mall. A whole pattern is emerging, and it seems to me that it is important to look so we can understand the dynamics of the accumulation of capital that are occuring right now *You know, Jagdish Baghwati recently published a book, In Defense of Globalization, where he argues that free market globalization has been a success in freeing people from poverty, political and social forms of domination, and even opening up a new kind of cosmopolitanism. How does your critical view of globalization respond to such claims?* A: I’ll respond in two ways, there is a lot of controversy over the kind of data you look at and how you prove that. For instance if you ask the question of how many people were in poverty in 1980 and how many people there are in poverty today, you might say, there are fewer people in poverty now than there was back then. But when you look at the economic performance, of say China and India, and you look at the aggregate data, it looks like the world is better off. If you start to look at social inequality however, you start to see in many instances, that neo-liberalization has increased social inequality, even at the same time that it has lifted some of the people at the bottom out of poverty. If you look at the concentration of wealth, at the very top bracket of society, you will see immense concentrations of wealth at the very top 0.1% of the population. At this point the question is: who is neo-liberalization really benefiting? And if you look at concentrations of political and economic power, it has largely benefited a very very small elite. And we have to start looking at that. For instance, the *New York Times* had this interesting data a couple of months ago. How rich, on average, are the richest 200 (or 400) families in the United States? I think the data showed that back in 1980, they had <http://www.samsharif.com/>something like $680 million. In constant dollars it is something like $2.8 billion. They have quadrupled their wealth in the last twenty years and this is a familiar story not just in the U.S but also globally. In Mexico, after neo-liberalization, you see the same thing. You see the same think happening in China and in India. When Thomas Friedman talks about a flat world, he is saying you do not have to come to America to be a billionaire; you can be a billionaire in Bangalore now. You do not have to migrate to America, but the social inequality in India is increasing dramatically. *Q: When you mentioned the living wage movement, it reminded me of something that goes back to Marx. That there is probably within these movements a discourse about wages, about inequality, about distribution. Marx’s idea was that there has to be a critical discourse about production process, which even the most radical of us tend to stay away from, maybe because there are no alternatives on the table. Lacking that discussion, how far can we get?* A: Well you have to start somewhere. One of my favorite passages from Marx is “The realm of freedom begins where the realm of necessity is left behind,” and he gives this rather long rhetoric about freedom. Then at the end of it he says, “Therefore, limiting the length of the working day, is a crucial demand.” So you go from a kind of revolutionary rhetoric to an almost reformist, kind of practical demand right now. And I think the difference between a reformist and a revolutionary is not necessarily that you do radical things all the time, but it is that at a given moment, you may all do the same thing, i.e. demand living wage, but you do it with a different objective, and that is as a long-term transition. A transformation, which is what you may have in mind, and I think that Marx was very well aware that if people are working 18-20 hours a day, 7 days a week, they are not going to be very revolutionary in their consciousness. They are going to be so damn tired, that they are not going to have time for anything, and therefore, creating spaces and possibilities for people to think of other possibilities is a precursor to a more general transformation. That is one of things that I certainly found out in the living wage campaign in Baltimore. People working two jobs, working 80 hours a week, and they do not have time to organize, they hardly have time to have a life, let alone be active in community organizations, and active as political organizers. It is very difficult to do that when you are in that situation. On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 8:02 PM, damodar prasad <[email protected]>wrote: > Thank you, Luisa. > > > On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 3:18 PM, Luisa Steur <[email protected]>wrote: > >> For those of you who might be interested, I attach the recently >> published Forum debate on "Accumulation by dispossession and Asia's >> "modernizing" Left", which I edited and wrote an intro to for the journal >> Focaal. >> The contents of the forum is as follows: >> >> FORUM >> >> >> >> *Accumulation by dispossession and Asia’s ‘modernizing’ Left * >> >> edited by Luisa Steur >> >> >> >> What’s left? Land expropriation, socialist ‘modernizers’, and peasant >> resistance in Asia >> >> *Luisa Steur and Ritanjan Das* >> >> >> >> The meaning of Nandigram: Corporate land invasion, people’s power, and the >> Left in India >> >> *Tanika Sarkar and Sumit Chowdhury* >> >> >> >> “Communist” dispossession and “reactionary” resistance: The ironies of the >> parliamentary Left in West-Bengal >> >> *Projit Bihari Mukharji* >> >> >> >> Land expropriation, protest, and impunity in rural China >> >> *Bo Zhao* >> >> >> >> Agricultural land conversion and its effects on farmers in contemporary >> Vietnam >> >> *Nguyen Van Suu* >> >> * * >> >> >> Best wishes, >> Luisa >> >> >> >> >> > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
