Transcript of the interview by François Lucas
On February 9, 2015 the renowned British geographer David Harvey, critic of capitalism, visited the city of Medellin (Colombia) to participate in the Open course Hernán Henao Delgado, organized by the Institute of Regional Studies (INER) and the Department of Anthropology of the University of Antioquia, whose theme was «uneven geographical development and production of space». In his lecture academic explained several major approaches his latest book: 17 contradictions and the end of capitalism.
This event was held as part of the XXV General Assembly of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences -CLACSO and VII Latin American and Caribbean Social Sciences Conference to be held in Medellin from 9 to 13 November 2015.
With INER management, IPC Press Agency was able to interview Harvey exclusively to discuss the crisis of capitalism and its impact on Latin America, the concentration of land in the context of the conflict in Colombia and the importance of this issue in the current peace process, accumulation by dispossession in relation to the mining sector, and representing the restoration of relations between Cuba and the United States.
IPC: Mr. Harvey, you we’re talking in your conference about equality, poverty, lack of space of justice. You have spoken of the tensions and contradictions of capitalism, how can you think about those things in the Latin American context?
DH: Well, It was not hard at all, you see that everywhere you go. Most cities I’ve visited in Latin America recently; Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Quito, there is a very well developed real estate sector that is building lots and lots of residences for very rich people in the midst of societies where housing conditions are not good for the mass of the population. So you ask yourself the question: how come capital likes to produce big buildings or create megaprojects which advantages the rich and why doesn’t capitalists do anything very much for the poor? The answer is well that’s what capitalism is, it’s a class divided system and the capitalist class dens all of the advantages, mainly at the expense of the lower classes.
IPC: In the context of the global crisis in the US and Europe that we’ve seen the last few years, the question is: in the global context what is the current crisis in Latin America, what are the possibilities or the weaknesses in Latin America?
DH: Well, there are two mechanisms by which the crisis was basically generated out of the United States and became contagious. One mechanism was through the financial system and that if you had invested in the strange financial instruments that the US had created then your banking system or the people who invested in it were caught in very serious problems. For instance, it was interesting that the first bank relative to get into big trouble was Paribas in France. It was not an American Bank but Paribas had invested a lot in the financial instruments that Wall Street was selling to the rest of the world. So this was the first mechanism by which the crisis spread to the rest of the world. The second was that the US is a leading consumer market to the degree that consumption in the US literally collapsed in 2008-2009 so any country that exported a lot to the US ran into difficulties. For instance, China lost about 30 Million jobs in just a few months because the export industry which depends upon the American market suddenly collapsed. So that was the second mechanism. Now in Latin American by large, the banking system was not heavily involved with the American States banking system, so it didn’t get much effect through the banking system. Latin America increasingly oriented its trade to China and to the degree that China came out of the crisis very quickly by a vast investment strategy so the Chinese demand for raw materials protected much of Latin America from the worst of the Crisis. So that like Chile had a lot of copper then obviously the Chinese would take it at good price. Commodity prices went up because of the China boom, iron ore, iron steel products from Brazil, and soya beans from Latin America to China. In a way Latin America received less of the bond to the crisis because it was not involved in the banking system and its export relations we’re less with the US than they were with China.
IPC: How does the cities and capitalism have a close relationship and how is the expansion of capitalism, the expansion of cities? So the question is what responsibility, role do the constructors and developers have to play in this and how can we understand their role in producing cities?
DH: The people who are mainly concerned with the question of how to dispose with surplus liquidity or surplus money, well that’s the banking system. So the bankers are constantly looking for ways to spend the money which are going to be lucrative to the bank. Obviously urban development and real estate is a very good investment historically provided that it doesn’t get out of hand. So what you see is a coalition emerging between the financial institutions, the developers, and theconstruction’s interest that will really push urban development, but in order for you to get good urban development you need infrastructure investment. So,at the same time they push municipalities and regional governments and national governments to invest a lot in infrastructure, particularly highways and means of communication in general, eventually also things like sewage disposal, water supply, some of which is provided by public institutions so there comes a point where there is an alliance of forces. The word for it that was used in the US is that they develop an “urban growth machine” alliance of all of these people who are actually pushing strongly for urban development. This also includes the landholders, so you have landlords, construction developers, finance, the local state which also like development because it gets more taxes, so the urban growth machine has become a very strong element in capitalist society over the last forty or fifty years.
IPC: About you’re experience in Medellin for the last couple days and given that Medellin is one of the cities that is trying to sell itself on innovation and kind of globally selling its brand to be the sensored development, how does your experience of what you see in the «comunas», make sense in term of capital accumulation in the cities?
DH: I would say it’s fairly predictable that at least half of the city is going to be populated by people with very low incomes. Those parts of the city will be rather badly serviced with infrastructures or with urban equipment and social services. So this is a classic way in which many cities are now organised that in the worst instances you get dual cities. You get the city of the poor and the city of the rich. Sometimes there is a middle class in between but you getvery class divided urbanization and generally speaking municipal governments favor businessinterest over popular interest.They favor delivering good services to the rich folk and the poor folk comes last. If there is anything left over they might get something but that’s the classic way in which capitalist urbanization works.
IPC: Even though the Colombian context is not something you studied particularly but the question was how can you think about accumulation by dispossession in the Colombian context given that the current struggles over land are very heighten here and the agro industrial elites still have a lot of power and there is a lot of conflict with the paramilitaries? So perhaps a kind of reflection upon accumulation by dispossession and the Colombian land issues.
DH: Dispossession can occur in a number of different ways. It can be done illegally and of course we’ve seen a lot of that in Colombia. It can also be done legally, through the power of the state exercising eminent domain for some reason like environmental issues or development issues so that people are expelled from the land and dispossessed of the land and dispossessed of their social networks and communities. So that can happen legally, it could also happen legally through market processes. People go and they buy up properties and gradually use their accumulated landholdings to undertake and develop a high rise condominium for the very rich which gives them high rates of return. So there are all kinds of tricks that can be used legally. For example, my old University in Baltimore has a big hospital; it wanted the land around the hospital, so it used what we call dummy corporations that way it wouldn’t be recognized and it bought up the houses when they became available. Then it bought them up and left them empty, which depressed the value of the other houses in the neighborhood and it would buy another house. Pretty soon there would be a block of houses with a lotof bordered out houses and drugs addicts would get into the houses and it would deteriorate tremendously so it was managed deterioration. It would allow at one point or another the city to say: « oh, that is a terrible block, what do we do with it? We should clearly give it to the University for development». So there are many mechanisms of dispossessions, some of which are easy to see, some of which are much more complicated because they involve these sorts of maneuvers, but you see this going on all the time. Right now there is a tremendous interest, global interest in land and there is this phrase that is emerging as a very important phrase which is what we call a land grad. Sometimes,its governments like the Chinese government in Africa, sometimes its private corporations, sometimes it’s the pension funds who are buying up land and in some cases forcing people off the land particularly if the land is held in a sort of traditional land tenure arrangement which then cannot be enforced.So there are lots of ways in which accumulation by dispossession is occurring on the land and through the land acquisition.
IPC: So even though it’s quite complicated with the kind of peace agreement that is going on at the moment, how could you think about strategies to intervene or improve this kind of dispossessions that are going on and that are being forced in the cities? What type of strategies can we think about in this context?
DH: Well, there is only one strategy that works: political organisation but of course in Colombia, that’s pretty impossible to do because if you organize politically you’re likely to get killed. I think that is still the case. You know, this is a process that it’s very very hard to stop here and given that oppositional movements sometimes are not very, not too honest either and that when they organize they often also engage in practices of dispossession. You have a very rough, very difficult situation, I think the only hope is that at some point a rather younger generation, your generation for example, will decide that they don’t want any of this and that they’ll therefore want to protect land rights and they want to protect populations that would be marginalised and dispossessed.
IPC: So more specifically with Latin America, how does this kind of model of primary exports and extractions of the resources and exploitation of the environment deepen or make worse processes of accumulation by dispossession which is specific to Latin America.
DH: Well, look if there is a collective interest in earning money through foreign trade because you need high tech equipment, phones, computer, all these sort of things, then it’s perfectly understandable that you would trade those things which you have and if those thing which you have are mineral resources and energy resources then it can be a collective interest in exploiting those resources and trading them because you need some of the others goods in return. So I don’t share the view that says you shouldn’t extract anything. The only interesting question is how do you extract, is there a consensus in the population that extraction is necessary, are the environmental costs of extraction shared, are the benefits of the environmental extraction shared, so those kind of question then come up. So, I don’t think all forms of mineral exploitation or energy or oil exploitation are by definition about accumulation by dispossession. I think however that given that a lot of the activities in the oil fields and elsewhere are organized and orchestrated by foreign countries they appropriate much of the value that comes out of these extractions then you would say this is accumulation by dispossession. That dispossession is largely supported by imperialist power and imperialist military intervention so you know, yes we could say that there are many instances where mineral and oil and energy extractions are in fact accompanied with accumulation by dispossession, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I think that in any economy you will probably need to extract something and there is a way of extracting it which is not about accumulation and is not about dispossession. So I think that you know what I sometimes hear which is that by definition all extraction is bad, I just don’t share that in just don’t see how that can possibly be. Because the people who say oil extraction is bad in say Ecuador, then go on a plane, they go somewhere, they come back, they use oil, they get in a car and they use oil and you know you’ve got to think about this in terms of who is benefitting and who’s not.
IPC: So what’s your opinion on the changing relation between Cuba and the US? What does it represent in capitalism, what does it represent symbolically for capitalism?
DH: I think it represents anything symbolically for capitalism except it’s a rather small market that capitalist can get into and gain from. Look, if the US are being sensible in its own capitalist interest it would have abandoned the embargo on Cuba years and years and years ago,because it would have been then able to use free-market processes to undermine the Cuban regime very much from within. What prevented that was of course was pure ideology and even more narrowly what prevented that was the fact that the Cuban population of Miami is very substantial. Florida is a swing state in terms of presidential elections and nobody who runs for president would ever say I’m gonna negotiate with Cuba and solve the Cuban problem because they would lose the next election in Florida. It’s not surprising that Obama which has no election to lose would do this so it’s more of a tactical kind of thing that relates to internal political life in the US and I don’t think it has any big implications on how capitalism functions or on how capitalism works.
Special thanks to:
Claudia Puerta Silva, former director of INER, and Elizabeth Montoya, INER researcher who facilitated the completion of the interview
Purceel Thomas, who served as interpreter
Tatiana Avendaño, who coordinated the meeting with Harvey
François Lucas, who transcribed the interview in English
