 I think we'll make a start. Hello everyone, a very, very warm welcome to everyone for this lecture which is part of the Development Studies and Bloomsbury DTC for the Social Sciences Seminar Series. My name is Faesia Ismail and I teach in development studies here at SOAS, and I'll be chairing the session. We have an extremely special guest today, Professor David Harvey, who will be speaking on the… He'll be speaking on the subject of anti-value in Marx. David Harvey is distinguished professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of CUNY, at the City University of New York. He's been writing on urbanization, the city space, uneven geographical development and capitalism for more than four decades. He's the author of many articles and books, including The Limits of Capital, The Condition of Post-Modernity, The New Imperialism, Paris capital of modernity, a llwyddiol yng Nghymru, Llyfrgell, Cymbannu yn y capital. Mae'r cyfwyr yn y cyfwyr cyfwyr yn 2012, 17 cyfwyr yn y Cymru yn 2014, ac yn 2016, y fwyaf ym Mhwy. Mae'n ddweud o'r cyfwyr o'r cyfwyr yn ei ddweud o'r cyfwyr yn ei ddweud o'r cyfwyr ac mae'n ymwyaf ym mwyaf, ymwyaf ymwyr i'w cyfwyr, ac y bwysig yn ymddangos i gael gweithio gweithio. David Harvey yn ymgyrch, a'r unrhyw yng Nghymru, a'r unrhyw yng Nghymru, John Hopkins University, Universtef Oxford, a'r unrhyw ymddiwch yn ymgyrchol 15 ymgyrch. Rwy'n meddwl i'r mewn ysgol yng Nghymru yn y Llywodraeth Llywodraeth i'r 90s. Rwy'n meddwl i'r unrhyw ymddiwch, ac yn ymgyrchol yng Nghymru, Oes bwysig geres Cymru, review nowu am gydaig, a'r unrhyw ymgyrchol i'r enw, ac yn unig i'r gweithio d Yupd, a'r unrhyw ymgyrch, a'r unrhyw ymgyrchol, ei wneud pan i gystafod cyd-dweithio'r hunain, ysgol iaith, a'r unrhyw ymgyrchol ymgyrchol, a'r unrhyw ymgyrchol yn ymgyrchol, ymgyrchol Ysgol iaith fe gw Bahlog, a'r unrhyw ymgyrchol i'r unrhyw ymgyrchol, i gynhyrchu i'r cymdeithas cymdeithas o'r ysgol. Felly, rhaid i'n gwneud cael ei fod yn cael ei wneud am gweithio'r holl a ydych chi'n cael ei wneud yn cael ei wneud ar gyfer hetoedd ar hyn o'r ampwg Cynlluniaethau, a'r hynod i bobl o'r 25 ystyried o'r ddeunio'r ddeunio'r ddeunio'r ddeunio ar gyfer hetoedd. Roeddwn i'n dweud i'r semenawr syr sydd o'n meddwl i'r rhai semenawr. mae'n gweithio, a gwybod, a chi'n cymdeithas y ysgolion d loweredrion, yr archifoedd y dyfodol, a'r dysgwziau a cyfyngaf, y nifer rydym yn ei ddod laws inviol ar gyfer y ddychydig a mobile ar y ddod yn ei ni'n ddiddordeb. Rydyn ni'n credu byddu'n cefnod ysgolion, y cefnod, yn ei ddod lŷm, ac yn dod o'r attitudell iddyn nhw, mae'n ddych chi'n swyddi'r cwmf McAddo oedd iddyn nhw i'n ddysgu'r I hope you all got a leaflet, and if you haven't got one, you can get one on the way out. We're going to be hosting Jayati Ghosh, Eric Reinhart and Rainer Cotell on demolishing neoliberal development myths, Cavita Krishan on power and patriarchy in India, how state-led women's empowerment undermines women's movements, and we're also going to have a panel on the Russian Revolution and global development lessons from the first hundred years. The seminar series would not be possible without your participation and your enthusiasm, but I also want to particularly thank our colleagues in the department in general, but also those who have helped put this series together, Joe Tomkinson, Nithya Natarajan, Jay Bhatia, Carolina Alves and Alfredo Saadfilo, but also the many, many volunteer students that give their time and their energy to ensuring that the series runs smoothly. This is an organisational feat at times to put together, and we simply could not pull it off without our brilliant volunteers. So yes, please give a round of applause for them. So the way we will run this session is that David Harvey will speak for 45 to 50 minutes, and then we will hear from Alfredo Saadfilo, who will briefly discuss David's presentation, and then we will open it up to questions from the floor, and we may take a few rounds. And just two final things. Yeah, as I say, if you haven't got a leaflet, get one outside. And if you're on Twitter, the hashtags are Soas Dev Studies and ESRC. Thank you. Well, it's great to be here and talking about supporting labour struggles. I've just been talking to some representatives of the cleaners here at Soas who've fought a fantastic job, and they are struggling as are all elements in the labour movement to deal with problems of subcontracting of the ways in which management does everything it can to avoid its obligations and to exploit its labour forces by all sorts of means. So I gather they have made some very important advances here and so as. I think that's terribly important, but they are as much members of the university as you are. And I think that on a basis, it seems to me important that they no longer be subject to subcontracting and that they should be brought in as part of the staff of the university so that we can have a real community of people from all walks of life as part and parcel of what the university is about instead of it being increasingly fragmented. Very soon, by the way, a lot of teaching is beginning to be subcontracted. So the faster you resist this kind of process, it seems to me, the more it would benefit everyone to be participants and in particular give them as much support as you can. Now, one of the things I've been doing over the last, I don't know, 10 or 15 years is, I guess in retrospect, I call it the Marx project. And I say in retrospect because I had no idea I was getting into it when I started it, but it seems to have taken me over. I would like to get out of it, but it seems that more and more I seem to get into it. And the project was founded on the fact that I was getting more and more impatient with a lot of misrepresentations of Marx. And I felt that something had to be done about that. I was also getting impatient with some of the work being done by Marxists which seemed to be dedicated to making Marx even more complicated than he already is. And that, therefore, there was a niche to be filled which was to try to find ways of representing what it was that Marx had to say. There was simple enough without being simplistic which were relevant to understanding everyday life and to try to find ways to bring people in to see that this particular critical way of understanding what is going on. It's not only revealing but also is helpful in diagnosing what to do about the dilemmas which are emerging all around us. In the course of this this led to a lot of publications but it also led to some exploration of various techniques. And about six months or so ago I was thinking of trying to come up with a visualisation of what capital was about. And I went back, being a geographer I was very well aware of what always seemed to me a rather wonderful visualisation of the hydrological cycle or the water cycle. And the thing I liked about it is you can get this sort of map of the waters in the oceans in a sort of pretty solid state then evaporates, goes into a gaseous state goes up, circulates round then it comes down as precipitation different forms of precipitation then gets on the land and gets back into the ocean but has different ways of travelling across the land. Some of it gets stored in underground aquifers until humans come along and pump the water out. Some of it gets stored in ice caps and things like that. So this system keeps on going round and round is an example of what Hegel called a virtuous infinity that it has the possibility to go on forever and ever. Though it does turn out that its main source of energy i.e. the energy from the sun while it is constant from the outside is arriving at planet earth differentially so there are some changes going on in the hydrological cycle because the energy levels which are felt through the cycle are gradually changing with climate change and all the rest of it but it seemed to me that when I was thinking about that I went back to Marx's definition of capital and the definition of capital which I think is central to what he does is that capital is value in motion and therefore it seemed to me important to say well where does capital move from to? What's its motion about? How can it be put together and could I do something like the hydrological cycle for the cycle of what is capital and what you see up there is what I've come up with. It's a very simple diagram and like all simple diagrams it misrepresents in some regards and I'll talk about some of those as we go forward but basically the circulation of capital goes like this that if you start with money down the bottom here and not all money is capital but capital is money used in a certain way which becomes money capital and the money capital is used to purchase commodities mainly labour, power and means of production and it's put into the process of production with a given technology Now the interesting thing about this first part is that in order for capital even to begin to circulate there has to be a very sophisticated monetary system already in existence, it pre-exists there already has to be a labour market and there already has to be a commodity market where you can go and buy means of production so all of those elements had to precede as it were the emergence of this form of circulation which is the form of capital circulation Now once it gets into production then there are two things that happened and there's a duality about production there is the production of commodities ie the material things which are going to be sold in the market but there's also the production of value and surplus value so there's a double operation there and I think this is terribly important always to remember that when Marx talks about production he doesn't necessarily mean production of commodities he often means production of value and surplus value and we have to be very careful about maintaining that distinction but the production process then is value creating and surplus value creating but it does it through the physicality of the production of commodities then those commodities are taken into the market and they are sold but there are different kinds of commodities there are wage goods which are then picked up and taken back into the reproduction of labour power as part of the value and define what the value of labour power is about there are luxuries as well as daily production goods some of which flow to the bourgeoisie in terms of their own consumption and there's also the production of means of production which flow back directly back in and circle back into the production process so the production that goes on in terms of commodities has that three-fold character but across all three of those elements the simple idea comes that the value is realised and it's realised in a different form that is what was a commodity which then became production of a commodity now becomes money so you go from beginning with money to money and the realisation of value in money form and this is a big shift because as soon as you move into the money form different things start to happen which can't happen in the commodity form and I think that it's very important to recognise the significance of this moment of realisation of value because it's a transition in form a bit like what happened at the hydrological cycle when something moved from, say, a gaseous state into crystals and the like so it's a transformation of form metamorphosis as Mark's like to call it and a metamorphosis which has important implications so the moment of realisation is significant but to be realised it means that people have to have enough money to be able to buy it and they have to want to buy so the question of once needs and desires feeds into this and also once needs and desires backed by ability to pay and the ability to pay has a very important role to play in the moment of realisation now once the capital has been realised in monetary form it gets distributed and turning this into a sequence this is really always going on simultaneously but it's useful to sort of set it out this way just for visualisation purposes but once the capital is in its money form it gets distributed, some of it gets distributed in the form of wages some of it gets taken as taxes some of it get taken as profit of industrial capital and then rent and interest and so on so it's distributed in various forms and therefore we get the moment of distribution and the moment of distribution is again rather separate why is it that the wage rate is the level at it's at why is it that rents are where they are why is it that the rate of interest is what it is there are all kinds of questions that arise around questions of distribution which is significant but all of that money which it gets distributed in this way then has two paths to take one is that the path is that the money forms part of the effective demand so it flows back into the moment of realisation as the wages of the workers flow back to buy the commodities which reproduce labour power then you get bourgeois consumption but you also get state expenditures which are terribly important and which Marx does not spend very much time talking about and I'll again come back to that in a little bit so it either goes that way or else it goes the other way that is it goes back into production which is going back into the cycle that we're talking about and as it goes back as reinvestment it generates another form of demand which is the demand of productive consumption so there are two sources of demand one is the final consumption which is at the top there and the other is productive consumption which is at the bottom and these two forms of demand if you like account for the totality of demand in a given society so this is the way in which the whole kind of cycle works and when you look at it you see that there are these metamorphoses that is things that are in a money form go into commodity form and then they go back to the money form or they go into productive activity and it is a continuous circular process and in the same way that you can ask the question where is the main energy coming from to push this system along as happened in the case of the hydrological cycle it was energy coming in from the sun whereas the primary source of energy that is going to impel this system onwards and what is that source of energy doing now the classic way to look at that is the way that Marx does of course in volume 1 of Capital in particular to say that nobody in their right mind would start the day with a certain amount of money as at the bottom and end up with the same amount of money at the end of the day after you've gone through realisation so they would only they're only incentive for engaging in that form of activity would indeed to get an increment which is of course the profit or the surplus value so that therefore surplus value becomes critical and the procurement of surplus value becomes the incentive if you like that individual capitalists have when they enter into production to cultivate as much surplus value as they possibly can through the exploitation of living labour and production and that this is the fundamental form of energy but actually it turns out when you start to look at this and this is the advantage I think of setting up something this way of a visualisation of this sort it also turns out you have to ask the question of what happens for the end of the day there's no profit to be had anyway where would the energy come from if for some reason or other there's not enough once needs and desires effective demand or demand for productive consumption what would happen to this circulation process because it becomes very clear from Marx the continuity of this circulation process is foundational and fundamental and that if therefore this system gets jammed up or stopped at any point then you have a major macro crisis on your hands and that's because one of the things that I want to talk about also is that where do crises come from and the answer is they can come from almost any point upon this map because whenever there is some moment where the system cannot continue cannot pass through a barrier and limit some constraints then you will have a crisis and a crisis can break out almost anywhere or one of the ways in which you can get a crisis is that when capitalist take their their commodity to market they don't find anybody who wants needs or desires it or they don't find enough people with enough effective demand to actually pay for it so at that point there will be a complete blockage in the circulation of capital there will be massive devaluation and that would be a kind of a major difficulty that would then have to be resorted to when something like that comes close to happening what happens? Well the answer is state expenditures typically come in to try and figure the gap so you have as it were a manipulation of demand way in which there can be some incentive to continue the dynamics of this system and that of course is the Keynesian solution in a very broad kind of sense that you face with low profit rates and nowhere to go then what do you do? You jack up demand through state expenditures and then the question right is where do the state expenditures come from? Do they come out of existing taxes or do you manufacture them by actually manufacturing money then we get into something else which is a kind of a certain things that go on in the field of distribution which again I'm going to come back to in a minute but that's the second source of incentive that is the effective demand management which increasingly in a capitalist society became significant and important the third source lies in the moment of distribution and this source is interesting and I put in there the kind of question of the circulation of interest bearing capital because people with surplus money and surplus funds sitting there need to have activity which is going to give enough money to them to survive and so they set in motion interest bearing capital and in this I include of course purchases of stocks and bonds and all the rest of it so this is put into circulation and there's an interesting kind of question right now to who is the primary source of the incentive to keep this system going and the pace it's going is it individual capitalists seeking surplus value and you know kind of the greed or the interest of the entrepreneur is that what's driving it is it state expenditures that are driving it or is it the needs of the bond holders to have somewhere to put their money where they're going to get a rate of return is the most important driver and one of the things I want to suggest here is that actually this third source of incentive and energy is becoming and has actually taken over very strongly as the primary source of the compulsion of this system to continue and the like so there are those three sources of incentive to increase and if you look at them you would say well actually in any given situation probably it's a mixture of all three but which is the balance between them which one is most important and most significant becomes I think a very important issue to discuss and to debate the second thing is that unlike the hydrological cycle this is not what Hegel called a virtuous infinity this is a bad infinity what he called a bad infinity and a bad infinity is something that has no end it has to grow because this system is based in fact on growth so instead of it being a cycle it becomes a spiral and if you go to the Grundrith, Mark's talks in a number of places about the transformation from simple reproduction which is circular to spiral form and if you notice the structure of both volume 2 volume 1 of capital there are chapters on simple reproduction which is talking about capital in its kind of virtuous infinity state and then kind of says well ok what happens to the virtuous infinity when it becomes a bad infinity and you start talking about accumulation for accumulation's sake endless capital accumulation sort of thing so that this is a sort of one of the things about this system that it is not an example of a virtuous infinity it's an example of a bad infinity and as we know we have a nice expression in English about using the word spiral we say things spiral out of control and there's a very interesting kind of question as to the degree to which capital is now spiraling out of control and should we actually take the spiral form and we start to look at this and start to ask some very serious questions about it there is now another point that I want to make and I think this is absolutely crucial for the way in which we read capital the three volumes of capital address completely different segments of this whole process volume 1 of capital starts with the money and takes you up to the point of realisation ok so it's just that side when it gets to the point of realisation what does it say? volume 1 of capital mark says I assume everything exchanges at its value that is there is no problem of realisation and furthermore he says I assume the manner in which the surplus is distributed has no impact so he abstracts entirely from the moment of realisation and from the moment of distribution and he says those elements are irrelevant I'm therefore going to model a capitalist system as if realisation and distribution is entirely neutral and has no role to play in this whole kind of circulation process and on that basis of course he derives it's a model which is just that segment up to realisation it's a model of capital and on that basis he derives things like the general law of capital accumulation and the like but I want to make it very clear that this is a restricted model and it's only as good as its assumptions and if you assume there's no problem of realisation i.e. no problem in the market and you assume there is no role to be played by facts of distribution then of course you can come to certain kinds of conclusions but they're contingent conclusions on the assumptions now most people of course read volume 1 when they read marks and they read it very carefully but they get the idea sometimes that that's the whole of the story about capital but when you look at what volume does in relationship to this whole system you see it is not the whole story of capital at all in fact what Mark says in the Grundrisa is that capital in order to understand it you have to look at the contradictory unity between production and realisation of value that is you cannot assume realisation is constant you cannot assume it's neutral in this whole thing it's very important so what does volume 2 do? volume 2 actually is really looking in part at the whole thing through the circuits of capital the circuit of money capital and commodity capital and productive capital and industrial capital so it's a kind of discussion of what the whole thing looks like but basically volume 2 is really about some of the questions of realisation but Mark approaches the questions of realisation in a very curious way he assumes there is no problem of realisation now that's sort of a bit Mark says of course to look at the problems of realisation by assuming there are none but his tactic is actually to work back from an equilibrium position to say well let's suppose there's no problems of realisation and actually all commodities exchange at their value then we can start to talk about the conditions under which that equilibrium point can occur and when you start to look at the conditions you find the conditionalities which are placed on what capital has to do are so finally just did and all the rest of it that all sorts of things can potentially go wrong which means that you won't ever get to the equilibrium position even though you've assumed that's where you want to be and one of the big things that goes on there is Mark starts to talk about the turnover time and that becomes very significant in the whole of this thing because we also have to ask the question how fast are we moving around how quickly do we move around and again one of the things that comes up is that Mark's in volume 2 also assumes that technological change is zero this is again a very strange assumption so with all commodities sold at their value in volume 2 and no technological change he then builds some models of how the economy actually works and what the problems are of actually demand not meeting supply and all the rest of it so it's an exploration of the dynamics of realisation under again some very very interesting assumptions and one of the things I want to emphasise in reading capital is always be aware always be aware of the assumptions that Mark's is using in any particular part of the text because on the basis of those assumptions he will say this and this happens but they are contingent on the assumptions drop the assumptions and that doesn't happen but people take those snippets and say oh he said this or he said that and treat it as if they're law statements that should apply under all circumstances no they're usually laws derived under a certain set of assumptions and change the assumptions and those laws no longer work the way that he describes so volume 2 is a very curious kind of thing but it basically focuses on the question of realisation and in particular I think for me there's something very very significant which is that in looking at differential turnover times Mark starts to recognise and particularly when he starts to look at fixed capital circulation and the like starts to recognise that this system that he's looking at cannot work without there being a well organised and very sophisticated credit system in other words if you want to smooth out the monetary exchanges that come from an exchange practices where some people are realising their product at once a year and some people every three months and some people every two days if you're going to smooth all that out and if you're going to have differential turnover times of fixed capital lasting 10 years 20 years and the like you need a sophisticated credit system because if you did not have a credit system the only way in which capital could fund all of this is to hoard money to hoard capital in other words this hoarding would be huge and in order to release the hoard the credit system has to come in and smooth everything out so there's an absolute necessity for the credit system to do that which brings us to then to what's going on in volume 3 volume 3 is basically about distribution it's about the distribution of the surplus value between individual capitalists in such a way that as we know from equalisation of the rate of profit that it's from each capital according to the surplus value they produce and to each capital according to the capital they advance so there's a kind of strange redistributive set of activities that go on amongst individual capitalists but then the distributions between rent and interest taxes and all the rest of it becomes again rather an element to be looked at and of course given what I've just said about the importance of the credit system Mark is in a situation where he's going to have to look at each one of these distributive categories and ask why is it that this category is insignificant and important for a fully developed capitalist system in other words he's not interested in examining feudal residuals I mean he has chapters on those things but he's really interested in why is it that the extraction of rent exists in a society which is dominated by industrial capital why is it that the interest rate is so significant to the industrial capitalists all those elements are tolerated even though they look like they came from feudal residuals there is a capitalist form of land rent a capitalist form of interest a capitalist form of states and taxation and all the rest of it that's the question he's really he's really asking now what this says then is that the three volumes of capital are situated in relationship to this diagram one is on the left-hand side doing that one's on the top about realisation another is about distribution and Marks had the idea which he's developed very much in the Grundry so that he really wanted to look at capital as a totality and one of the arguments I want to make is that if we were projecting forward as to where Marks was going to go with these incomplete volumes of volume 2 and volume 3 and where would he have gone after he had completed them surely it would have been towards trying to reconstruct capital as value in motion as a totality of all of these different moments in other words really to understand what capital is about we need to keep all of these elements in play with each other and we need to be thinking about the circulation process of capital as a whole and its spiral form and what is happening to it in other words instead of just studying taking a few lines out of volume 2 and saying see that's what he says in volume 3 or see what he says somewhere else we should really start to rewrite what he's saying around the idea of the totality of this system which is going on and on and on but it's also spiralling onwards and potentially as I've suggested right now spiralling out of control if so where is the spiralling happening and why is it happening in a way that it's particularly happening now in the middle of looking at all of this I think that something interesting immediately comes out which is this that at the very first chapter the very first section of volume 1 of capital Marx is talking about the value theory so it's value in motion and he's talking about the labour theory of value and I don't have time to elaborate about how Marx is developing that labour theory of value here but he's talking about that and I'm talking about its motion but he says something very interesting because the first section is all about the production of value and socially necessary labour time abstract labour all those kinds of things come significant but the last two sentences of the section say this he says if there is not a one need or desire for a commodity if there is no affected demand for a commodity then there is no value the labour expended on the good is wasted it's irrelevant now this is interesting because right throughout the rest of capital as I've said he's going to rule out the rest of volume 1 of capital he's going to rule out any problems of this sort but what this means is that in order for value to be produced there has to be a society in which once needs and desires are orchestrated in such a way as to consume the kinds of products that are being created and therefore one of the big things about the whole history of capitalism is the creation of new once needs and desires and value is contingent on that most people concentrate when they're reading about Marx on production he's on about that all the time in volume 1 that's his topic in volume 1 but that's not the whole story because if you're interested in the unity contradictory unity between production and realisation if you get to this point of realisation and there's no want, need and desire it has not been created and if there is no effective demand because nobody has enough money to buy it then there is no value so value does not exist outside of a given state of once needs and desires so where does that state of once needs and desire come from well I put something up there about production and reproduction of human nature and I think this again is terribly important because actually you have to produce new kinds of human beings with new wants and needs and desires to keep going with a lot of what capital production is about and in particular when you start to look at things like turnover time you've got to start to look at accelerating turnover time well you can't accelerate turnover time in production without actually accelerating turnover time in consumption how many times have you bought a new phone in the last ten years capital creates things in such a way as to construct your things but then we consume it and we have to consume it if we all decided to turn our phones off and throw them away you know capital would be in a terrible terrible mess and so the construction of once needs and desires in society becomes a terribly important part of value theory or should be a part of value theory you cannot avoid it but Marx avoids it entirely in volume one of capital and interestingly in volume two of capital by assuming that all commodities always exchange at their values but he said you know I know that's not necessarily true and as assumption it's not necessarily true now what this says is that actually capital can produce not value not value and this suddenly when you go back and you read Marx you find that actually this notion of not value is coming in all over the place because he says a commodity loses its value not because it can't be sold cannot be sold within a certain time so the temporality of the system becomes significant speed up the temporality and something has to be sold very quickly, very fast consumer times have to be reduced and if capital cannot restructure society around the idea of fast turnover times in consumption then it is screwed I mean I still use my grandmother's knives and forks if capital only made things like knives and forks like that good solid Sheffield steel that just cannot possibly be broken or smashed around or fall apart when you pick it up if capital produced things like that it would be a disaster okay and of course people are always yelling at me saying they're old fashioned knives and forks why don't you get some of those slick new ones so the fashion industry all the rest of it gets in here too so my point about this is that the value theory has to incorporate this most discussions of Marx's value theory concentrate solely on production they do not concentrate on the state of what needs and desires when it is absolutely the case the end of section one of volume one of capital he says if there's no wants and needs and desires there's no value so no value becomes significant and actually he models there's no value throughout the Grunderyser in particular in a very very interesting way he basically says whenever the motion stops value is gone that is if a commodity stays as a commodity for more than a certain period of time it's going to be devalued if capital spends too much time in production it's devalued if it spends too much time on the market it's devalued so each one of these and I assemble a whole bunch of little pieces of his together and put a composite together and you get this picture that actually capital is circulating here where it is value and then it actually is not value anymore it's anti value and then suddenly it gets resuscitated again because it gets pushed back in motion so he's actually getting a situation in which there's a dialectic going on all of the time between value and anti value and this dialectic between value and anti value is absolutely critical to the way in which he understands where crises potentially come from because they come from the anti value which is always always there it doesn't come from outside it's always always there and it's always the possibility and everybody will know surely what that means a capitalist who goes into production and ends up producing something and takes it to market and nobody wants needs and desires it it just sits there but they've lost their value that's anti value they confront the potentiality of anti value every day or all the time so you have to then say well actually Marx's theory of value is really a theory of value and anti value in dialectical relation and then people look at you as you're crazy and I say well but how does contemporary physics understand the world it understands it as a relation between matter and anti matter everything is set up that way and Marx is thinking about capital that way and I like to talk to these economists who have physics envy by saying actually Marx got to this way of thinking before the physicist did if they'd read Marx and then started doing their physics the way Marx sets this up they would have had matter and anti matter in their heads way at the very very beginning you know because Marx had value and anti value in his head all the way through this all the way through this now anti value is a complicated question and I don't have time to go into all of its details here I'm trying to work some of these out but let me give you the big idea of anti value what is the biggest form of anti value you can think of it's debt debt is a claim on future labour it's a fictitious claim on future labour and debt has to be redeemed by value production that's why interest bearing capital and lending of capital becomes absolutely crucial to the dynamics of this capitalist society that we're in all of the data you look at since the 1970s shows a huge huge increase in indebtedness in private and public indebtedness the total indebtedness in the economy IMF has just put out a report on total indebtedness in the global economy and it's 225% of the total GDP of the world that's what it is right now in 2000 it was only 200% back in 1970 it was about 70% so you just look at this and what you see is greater and greater amounts of indebtedness which is anti value being created and interestingly when you start to look at this and this is where my geography starts to come in you start to look at this in all these kinds of ways production, realisation, distribution don't necessarily occur in the same place so actually what we've got here in London we have all of these debt bottling plants which are actually anti value creation plants which are spreading their net around the world in such a way and then saying somebody somewhere create the value to redeem all of this debtedness and who's going to create that value that's going to redeem it not them in London no good god they're going to sit there and drink there martini's at lunchtime kind of thing no who's going to do it is the people in Bangladesh and the people in Shenzhen and all the rest of it and you'll see exactly the same thing going on in other moments of this whole circulation process because value is produced in one place doesn't mean it is realised in that place the value produced by Foxconn in my Apple computer is produced in Shenzhen it's realised in the United States by Apple the rate of return on capital for Foxconn last I read the Financial Times is something like 3% the rate of return on Apple is 28% which says that value being created in China is being realised in the United States in the same way that debt being created in New York and London is being redeemed in Bangladesh in Shenzhen and all the rest of it so these are the kinds of things that come out of this way of thinking and the significance of anti-value is this that actually it's all about foreclosing on the future that is you cannot get out of capital I mean the reason it's so hard to imagine getting out of capital is because we're so indebted that we're actually foreclosed upon in terms of what we're going to do for about the next 15 to 20 years which is of course exactly why in the United States we've created a whole generation of debt encumbered students because debt encumbered students are obligated to go out for the rest of their lives and retire the damn debt so it since debt is a claim on future labour future labour has already been mortgaged and has already been structured in such a way that there's almost no way we can get out of it and that is how capital is reproducing itself now is by putting these debt claims and of course behind it lies the tendency to get into the thing where so much debt is being created if it's 225% of all the global GDP and rising continuously and actually it's been rising significantly since 2007-2008 I mean you would have thought after 2007-2008 you would have seen a deleveraging of society but it's not, it's being leveraged higher and higher and higher and so these are the kinds of things that actually when you're sort of looking at this you kind of say where's the energy to reproduce a capitalist system anymore I really don't believe the individual 3D for profit is kind of as anywhere near as significant now as it was in the 19th century I think it's more and more and I think the Keynesian stuff is still there, very much there it's just that it's not being filtered through social welfare things it's mainly subsidies to capital through military expenditures and all the rest of it so there's still a great deal of Keynesianism around and state utilisation and the state of course is borrowing capital that goes through the state and again it's foreclosing on the future of what a state can do and you can see right now who's in power in the world it's the bondholders, right and if the bondholders are in power they have to be somewhere within the system and located within the system in such a way as to exercise control over the totality of it and I think it is important to think totality Marx didn't finish this and I think we should be working on how to finish this and there are lots of kind of complications in this system but to me it's useful to have a visualisation of this kind because it tells you all kinds of aspects of how this world is working the speed up the necessity to produce instantaneous forms of consumption why is it that in our society actually the society is one of spectacle why is it that the geography of this thing is redistributing incredibly from sites of production of values to sites of distribution to sites of realisation how all of that redistribution is going on secretly as it were in terms of the dynamic and I think that Marx is analysis which I'm trying to push push through here which is to set up something like this and to do it in this simplified way actually poses some wonderful interesting kinds of questions as to how this system is going to survive when it is spiralling as I've suggested because the one form of capital which can increase infinitely without any restraint whatsoever is the money form provided the money form is liberated from any material constraint which of course has happened in the demonitisation of the local world money system I mean you can just add a few zeros to the money supply any time you like it can go on infinitely it's difficult to have an infinite increase in commodities it's difficult to have an infinite increase in productive activity all the other forms can't stretch to the bad infinity but the one bad infinity that is possible is in fact the money supply and guess who's launching the money supply who's using it, who's leveraging it who's you know where it's coming from so this system depends more and more on what's going on in the centre of distribution now Marx quite understandably in volume one emphasised the moment of production and did an extremely good job I think of talking about what goes on on that left hand side and it's great but we're not going to get anywhere unless we actually read volume two that nobody ever really bothers to read and really get into the distributive side of volume three and what the distributive side is really all about and then of course we have to do some other things which is you know to me as a geographer is very important okay how is this form of motion actually occurring in space and time and actually what are the spatiotemporalities of all of this why is it that capital surplices that are the bad the bad infinity gets absorbed as it were but now increasingly is being absorbed in such a way as to be almost totally destructive and I just cannot ever resist talking about some of the things that are going on in the world in my interest in urbanisation and urban development you have to understand that on the commodity side some incredible things are happening that the Chinese consumed more cement in two or three years 2011 to 2012 than the United States consumed in the whole century that is 45% more cement they consumed in two or three years than the United States consumed in the preceding hundred years and if you lived in the United States we know we've poured a lot of cement but when you go to China I mean it is astonishing what they've done it's astonishing in 2007 the Chinese had 10 miles of high speed train network they now have 12,000 when they're going to go to 19,000 within the next three years I mean this is an astonishing transformation the result is that China has consumed half of the world's cement half of the world's steel about 60 or 70% of the world's copper and everybody who has produced those goods has done very well out of the China trade until the China trade starts to go down a bit because as always happens in these situations somebody starts to see that actually there's overproduction of the built environment 25% of Chinese GDP has been taken up by housing construction alone 50% of GDP in China has been taken up by urbanisation and infrastructure development alone I mean this is an astonishing transformation of the world but if you compare it to what happened in the US after World War II the interstate highway system the building of the suburbs which was a similar kind of way of absorbing surplus capital and a huge urbanisation project a Chinese is far, far bigger than that whole thing that happened then and if you compare it back as I like to do always with what happened in Houseman's Paris I mean Houseman's Paris was a sort of little blip like this compared to what happened in the United States after 1945 and that was something in China since 2007, 2008 now the interesting thing is my view is that global capitalism was stabilised after 2007 and 2008 by one country China and by one doing one thing pouring cement and that was a solution to the crisis and now they've poured enough cement and don't know what to do with it so what are they doing they're actually taking their cement steel and building rail lines all over East Africa they have the One Road one thing where they're going to go from Shanghai to Istanbul right through central they're building trans continental rail and road links across the Andes and across the Amazonia I mean the Chinese have got surplus productive capacity and what does everybody do is to use your surplus productive activity they're engaging in what I call the Spatial Fix you find somewhere else to use your surplus productive capacity so that's what they're doing but again all of this is funded by the fact that China is now one of the most indebted countries in the world it started in 2007 and 2008 with hardly any debt it's now hugely indebted it's something like 285 or even 300% of GDP debt the only thing about China is it's not indebted in dollars it's indebted in its own currency and the advantage of that is it can just add zeros to its own currency so these are the kinds of things that it seems to me that come out when you start with a simple representation of this kind which I think, I hope I like to think is reasonably comprehensible reasonably understandable there's a way in which people can understand then understand that some of the relations that exist within this dynamic simple dynamic of what happens when you start to consider capital as value in motion and then you start to map that capital both in space and time but also in terms of the ways in which these elements are pulled together into a coherent system which is actually then entering into what I would call this dangerous infinity this bad infinity which is spiraling out of control so my time's up so let me leave it there thank you David so we're now going to hear from Alfredo Saadfilo Alfredo is professor of political economy in development studies and he's written widely on neoliberalism Latin American political and economic development and the labour of theory of value amongst much else just briefly thanks Faisi and thanks David for a fantastic presentation this was really great it's of course a huge honour to be here this evening David Harvey is incredibly influential as an analyst as a theorist within the broad field of Marxist political economy has been hugely influential in my own life as well it's a great privilege to be here and it has been one of the most elegant one of the most clear and lucid presentations of Marxist theory of value that I have seen in this diagram will be spotted in my own lectures next term and this is clearly a difficult topic and David illustrated some of the complications of the attempt to capture the determining features that defining the distinguishing features of capitalism in a comprehensible amount of theoretical work and in doing this Marxist political economy and Marxist political economists have demonstrated the same amount of sectarianism, craziness personal madness as any group of theorists working anywhere in the social sciences and in the hard sciences as well in the case of Marxist political economy this is particularly complex because disputes will involve what Marx said what Marx should have said what Marx would have said if he had completed his work to what extent Marx's work applies today and how can we apply this in order to make the revolution as rapidly as possible all of this leading to an enormous overlapping set of difficulties that sometimes become extremely funny the relevance of it all to me is transparent it is exactly what David said at the beginning it is to capture everyday life that is the point of the whole figure it is the point of the work of Marx how can we understand the world in which we live and of course for this the circuit is extremely useful now my questions will be in terms of the historicity of this circuit this is perfectly general it applies for capital as such it is an ahistorical representation of the structures the fundamental structures of capitalist reproduction but what my question is what about the phases of capitalism can we see phases of different phases or stages of capitalism in the circuit or how can we distort the circuit or adapt the circuit or apply the circuit to understand different stages in the development of this particular beast now in particular I am especially interested in something that is absolutely current how can we see neoliberalism there so how would we spot it then and then what is neoliberalism if we look at this figure how can we understand the defining the distinguishing features of neoliberalism now one thing that was suggested just a moment ago is that under financialized forms of capitalism capital spirals out of control now I would appreciate it if you could explore the meaning of this you mentioned the issue of debt you mentioned the issue of social discipline what else can we say about this particular craziness of capital and then my last question and I'll stop here what is the meaning of the current crisis what is the meaning of the economic and political imbalances that we see in the world today in terms of our understanding of the circuit of capital there so for example you mentioned the case of China but let's talk about the case of the United States and the case of the UK does the victory of Brexit, does the victory of Trump imply the end of neoliberalism how can we read it using this particular set of tools that we have here in front of us thanks very much David a few minutes to respond and then we'll open it up to the floor part of that depends very much the answer to that question depends very much on what I was mentioning alluding to at the end when I want to talk about the space and time of this I mean Mark's when he just published the first volume of capital wrote a letter to Cougalman kind of saying you know the real science begins when we start to study how the laws of value assert themselves in everyday life and that I think is one of the big forms of study that needs to be taken I think that for me anyway looking at this we tend to think that as a worldwide phenomena I don't think there's any way you can say what China did between 2007 and just recently is neoliberal it was in effect massive Keynesian style program because the Chinese lost something like 30 million jobs in the export sector 2008 because of the collapse of the US consumer market they had 30 million unemployed if you have 30 million unemployed and you're in the communist party you've got to do something so they said build build build and they built and they built and when you're there you just see what they built I mean it's just astonishing it's just really is astonishing and when I say I think that that's what kept global capitalism alive during those years I think it's I think it's it can make a pretty good case that that was so a lot of Latin America experienced 2007-2008 fairly shallow kind of effect because of the China trade it was sending raw materials to China and the demand for raw materials in China was so huge that Chile and places like this and countries like Australia hardly felt 2007-2008 so it was a big Keynesian type thing and I think it's interesting that one of the things that Donald Trump is suggesting is a vast infrastructural investment program and I think it's going to be very curious the Republican Party will try to stop him but the Democrats will support him so actually in the middle of his presidency he may switch parties but I think that he's promised jobs jobs and more jobs and you've never seen economic development like it how can he do it you look at the options he cannot do it by bringing jobs back from abroad that's all impossible a little bit could be done but that's impossible repatriating profits from US corporations none of that's really going to work the one thing he can do is to launch a huge on the scale of China type of infrastructural redevelopment project and my bet is that that is one of the things he's going to do and try to do and it's going to have to be deficit financed and the Republican Party are either going to have to kind of I don't know it'll probably divide the Republican Party but like I say the Democrats will support him and so in a sense the kind of the ideological grasp of what a lot of neoliberal stuff has been weakening it seems to me over the last year anyway and I think that this is going to mean that we're going to move this way and it has to be this way because China cannot continue on its path it's already got over accumulation of capital in the built environment in a very very big way surplus productive capacity and cement and steel and we know what's going on with steel they're dumping steel all over the place and they're in trouble with the WTO and all that sort of thing so there's a lot of mess in the wake of what the Chinese did which is going to have to be cleaned up but the Chinese cannot continue at the pace that they did over the last 10 years they're they're pooped out frankly in terms of what they can do and the only place that can really possibly do something to pick up the slack is the United States I don't think Britain's in a place to do anything very much but actually we could see an Anglo-American push of some kind but at the same time I think there's the debt bottling plants as I call them is a very intriguing one because at the same time we just came out a few years ago a crash in the property market we've seen what's happening in the property market everywhere right now this is another area where there's a huge amount of accumulation going on through rental extractions and all the rest of it so I think that there have been many shifts which have been going on under neoliberalisation and the core of what neoliberalisation was always about for me was a project on behalf of the top 1% to try to accumulate even more wealth and power than they already had and if you look at all of the data since 2007-2008 who's accumulated all the wealth and power the top 1% and in fact this is one of those cases where you know as the capitalist sometimes like to say you should never let a good crisis go to waste and they've done a very good job of accumulating huge wealth and power so in that sense the neoliberal project if you consider it as I tend to as a class project to monopolise as much wealth and power as you possibly can that that is still alive and well and I don't see any mass challenge to that at this point there could arise a mass challenge very quickly in certain ways but again maybe people want to talk about that and there's a separate question thank you okay so we will take several questions and if you could just keep your contributions succinct so we can get in as many people as possible and there are two roving mics around okay I will take the woman over there in the yellow do you want some yeah okay yeah hello well my question is about something you said on the global level of value production circulation and distribution and do you think Marx already envisioned this global aspect of capital or is this something more recent we have to theorise about because throughout capital from volume 1 to 3 when he is developing his more abstract theory he is always giving examples on world trade and a more a global scope of the theoretical approach he is pursuing so is this something new or how do we theorise about it thanks sorry I should just say just indicate to me and I will kind of meet your eye and if you are taking too long I will tap like this okay woman in the green and then Ale sorry sorry yeah you degrowth yeah degrowth okay thanks thank you so we will have you in a moment just a cement exporter in the world just before Thailand but there has not been a big increase in the exports of cement since 2011 the country which has increased cement exports the most has been Greece which has of course had a completely different economic development in China perhaps you could explain that within your framework my second question is about money and you said that money could be expanded indefinitely or infinitely but could the national bank of Sweden just add a few zeros to the debt would that work and the same question in a different form is if the US growth falls rapidly like it did in the depression in the 1930s could they continue adding zeros to the debt thank you you mentioned it briefly in relation to neoliberalism but the practical question is the more conventional way of politics resistance has been conceptualized in terms of factory proletariat in the production sphere and since you're emphasizing the contemporary times is shifted towards distribution bond holders how do you conceptualize the form of resistance within the distribution sphere of distribution and where do those struggles how do we articulate those struggles thanks we'll have Lenin just now thank you Lenin so we'll have you in the thank you Lenin so we'll have you in the thank you their own money locally to generate regional development so I was wondering what are your thoughts so far in terms of local regional development ending these debt waddling plans thank you thanks we'll have you what you think of the hydro social cycle that brings in more of the human element to show the actually water relations even in the hydro cycle water is also extracting is that burden it's down from the ground so humans have very much influence on the system and the cycle and I wonder how this can fit in here in terms of identifying structures where crisis can actually intervene or intervene in a way to structure thanks do you want to take a stab at those all right I'll answer all those questions like that my god where do we go let's start with the global thing marks something interesting about the structure of the three volumes of capital is that the description of globalization in the communist manifesto and in the Grundrisa is far far more sophisticated and well developed than it is in capital and I've always found that rather surprising but I can give you an explanation why that the end of volume one of capital marks dealt with the theory of colonisation which actually was proposed by Hegel which suggested that you could resolve the inner contradictions of capitalism via colonisation procedures and marks his answer to that is that when you look at actual colonisation procedures and you look at the proposals of Wakefield and all of that what you see is that the colonising power wants to keep land under control in such a way that Labour can't get access to the land so that Labour will not have access to the means of production and will have to be a wage labour force but secondly he seems to suggest that actually Hegel's solution which would solve the internal contradictions of capital by some external adjustment as far as marks was concerned it simply takes those internal contradictions and projects them onto a bigger stage i.e. the world stage so as far as marks was concerned he actually confines himself in the three volumes of capital for the most part looking at the internal contradictions of capital and he excludes any systematic investigation of any external what I call spatial fix to the over accumulation problems or problems of that kind so he tends to do that in capital now every now and again in capital he kind of says well Australia comes into it like this and India is turned into a field for part of the international delivery international division of Labour and of course when he gets to finance and he gets to those questions it's financing a foreign trade that starts to become significant but by enlarging capital he tends to not to actually explore in any very deep and systematic way the processes of globalization those are much better explored in as I've suggested in the Grundrisa and in the Communist Manifesto and there's some fantastic arguments made there they're really very precient about what's going on but the globalization that's envisaged in the Communist Manifesto has taken eternity to be arrived at but we're closer to it now than ever before so yeah he's got that in his mind that this is what capital is doing and he says it's in the nature of capital to create the world market and it's in the nature of capital to go global and he's very clear about that so his general argument is that but in capital it's not as I've said well developed because he's mainly concerned to say I'm only concerned with the internal contradictions of capital not some external and he's not interested either in the general theory of what happens if you're dealing with monopoly capital and he's not interested either in the general theory with what's the role of feudal residuals in a capital in actual capitalist society and I pretend those don't exist so his theory in capital doesn't get into those sorts of things a question of degrowth yeah there's a kind of interesting literature going on on that and of course we have some examples of degrowth which are rather uncomfortable to live with and you just don't want to go and live in Detroit and there are shrinking cities around which but I think they are extremely interesting to look at for the simple reason that if there is going to be forced as it were degrowth by the collapse of economic capacities like in the great depression or something of that kind then the question of how to handle that is very much a political question on the agenda. I would argue however that what we're going to look at is not the abandonment of all growth but selective developments selective growth which is could amount to degrowth in certain areas or a kind of growth which is far less stressful for instance 40% of the food supply in the United States goes to waste now there's a lot of hungry people in the United States so there's issues about are there ways to to utilise that but that's going to take a form of sociality and almost state subsidy and all the rest of state organisation or communal organisation something of that kind to take the waste and turn it into something otherwise we can't all live as dumpster divers as they're called it's a bit of difficult but there are all sorts of things and there is a huge waste going on one of the biggest areas of waste is contemporary urbanisation we're building cities these days for people to invest in not building cities for people to live in and that's a huge waste huge waste we're building high end condominiums in New York City like crazy all for the billionaires and the rich at the same time we've got a huge crisis of affordable housing 60,000 people who are on the streets homeless people 60,000 in the city and this is no provision is being made so all of these materials are being trying to build these things which people are not going to live in they're just going to invest in them it's just for people from the Gulf States and so on to invest in so there's plenty of ways in which you can start to say all of that effort has to be put on the creation of affordable housing for the mass of the population and we don't have a decent affordable housing program so there are many things of that sort which are switches of how assets are being but that comes again and again from the fact that all of these forms of provision are provided through the market and the market works extremely well for those people who have money if you don't have money it doesn't work well at all so housing is great if you're in the upper middle class it's terrible if you're anywhere else if you're any other social strata so it's not only degrowth it's reconfiguration of what growth is about and we don't need to grow the food supply we need to use the food supply we have in a much more efficient much more effective much more socially just kind of way so there are all sorts of questions of that kind the grease cement well you know everywhere you go you will find specific examples of this kind which don't immediately read off from a framework of this kind and I think that obviously if I'm looking at something that's going on in the city of Baltimore I can't go to the city of Baltimore and go to this and say this is the answer, no we have to work out from first principles exactly why I happen to know why grease in lots of ways is into cement because cement has been an important industry in Greece and one of the things that's held it back all the time is all of this concern for ancient monuments right now to the degree that they've been forced to actually sell off and not bother about their ancient monuments and they can sort of start putting cement plants all over the place and so this is you know again this is an extractivism but notice this is an extractivist economy and cement extraction is if you've lived next to a cement plant it's not nice and actually it's high polluting and it's high energy consuming and it's bad for greenhouse gases everything else so the fact that the Greeks are into something which is a noxious form of industry doesn't surprise me at all because they'd be giving no option except to go into those kinds of industries now could Sweden the world's central banks have become of course crucial institutions Sweden on its own probably not so to good position the big ones who can actually add zeros to their you know are the European Central Bank and of course the Federal Reserve and the Bank of China they can add the zeros and what have they done they've actually engaged in something called quantitative easing which is actually adding zeros to the money supply and where's all the money gone it hasn't gone actually into a productive activity it's mainly gone to the financial sector and what have they done they've basically bought out their own you know they've deleveraged and bought back their own stock and it's forced up the stock market hasn't done anything very much to actually stimulate that much growth you need fiscal policies not monetary policies but unfortunately most of the western world fiscal policies have been ruled out I think they're going to come back I think that's one of the things that Trump is going to bring back this also goes down to the question of class interest and I haven't mapped that in here and this applies also to the hydrological thing to me the value theory of Marx is very much about alienation and therefore the whole kind of question of alienation from nature which is why talking a little bit at the bottom here about free gifts of nature and how those free gifts of nature are appropriated and turned into rental streams by capital and what that does in terms of the nature of the labour process and the nature of the struggles which are increasingly about an alienating world I mean the politicians keep talking about creating jobs the problem right now is that there are no meaningful jobs so it's not only jobs it's meaningful jobs and I think that the state of alienation in society is huge all over the place some of that alienation is emerging over the realisation question and that brings me the accumulation by dispossession there's a politics of production Marx talks a lot about that there's a long history in Marx he's talking about the politics of production there's also a politics of realisation and a politics of distribution and if you are in a city like New York right now and you say what's more important the politics of production or the politics of realisation and people kind of say what do you mean by politics of realisation I mean the way the credit card companies put extra money on the way the telephone companies screw you the way in which landlords are jacking up rents at a rate which is absolutely absolutely unlivable so there's actually class struggle fierce class struggle goes on at the point of realisation except it's not class struggle in the sense it is at the production in production there's a relationship between capital and labour but as Marx points out at the point of realisation the labour is a consumer so the big fight that goes on in realisation is between buyers and sellers and that's a different structure of political protest but if I'm trying to get somebody to understand what's going on in this system and I say okay let's go around and look at the fighting points what in this audience did you have yesterday which really got you mad as hell was it something in production or was it something that's going on at the point of realisation and you find realisation is very strong and there's a huge amount of accumulation by dispossession going on and a lot of it is of course at the point of realisation the foreclosure movement was accumulation by dispossession and the evictions that are going on all over the place is just astonishing everywhere everywhere not only you know I mean I just come back from Barcelona going on a lot of organising anti-eviction organising we have evictions in the United States so what's going on at the point of realisation is a political is a political quagmire in terms of of all sorts of movements which are emanating there and if you look at what the main movements have been over the last 15 years it's things like Gazy Park which is not a production movement what happened in Brazil in 2013 was not about production it was about daily life in the cities and the impossibility of having a decent life in a decent living environment in a decent city and therefore there is a level of protest which is going on in terms of urban based protests of alienated populations living in a sea of alienation and a lot of political kind of movement of people trying to create unalienated heterotopic spaces in cities where they can do something different and not be caught within this kind of sea of alienating behaviour and demands which are constructed in urban environment so a lot of political protest is actually around urban issues and that is classically about questions of distribution particularly in the way in which the Rontier class is extracting rents hand over hand in the cities right now and forcing land prices and property prices up and up and up affecting not just simply working people that affecting everybody for instance one of the biggest protest groups in New York right now potentially are the small individual family businesses in the restaurant trade who are all being forced out of business by the fact that rents are being doubled and tripled at a drop of a hat and they cannot afford it anymore so this is a world in which the political struggles around this map are interesting classically Marx have always concentrated on the struggles at the point of production actually I've always been interested as an urbanist in the struggles over realisation and also over distribution right now I think distribution struggles are as significant as the production struggles and this is why you get into the question of what's the alternative to all the ways in which debt bottling plants are working can you do it with local currencies and I'm sorry to tell you my answer is no you can't do it with local currencies I like local currencies who wouldn't you know they're friendly if they go right they're usually small they're usually okay for redistributing but all the time the local currencies are convertible into the major currency they're just a sort of a spin-off of the major structure and it allows a certain kind of sociality to function which is very good and very nice but it doesn't do anything very much to actually create an alternative monetary form if you want an alternative monetary form there are two conditions that have to prevail the first is it should not be convertible you cannot convert it into the main currency it has to remain independent strictly independent of the major currency and the second thing is that currency has to be oxidizable that is you cannot accumulate wealth and power through it and by oxidizable I mean if you don't use it it disappears in other words for those of you familiar with this the model you would have in our society right now there will be airline miles if you don't use them in two years they disappear well if you had a form of money that was like that if in two years you didn't use it then you wouldn't be able to accumulate so the the anti-accumulation form of money is absolutely crucial but you can't do the anti-accumulation form of money all the time you've got a form of money which is actually convertible into the main currency so it depends a little bit on how local currencies are constructed but most of them are constructed around this kind of form of sociality which I think is nice in a way and I think if you can establish good decent social relations with people it comes back to this idea of creating heterotopic little spaces within a sea of alienation and I think that's okay I'm all in favour of doing that but what we need to do is to think about the sorts of strategies that are needed to create a macro transformation towards an alternative kind of society so we'll take one last round of questions so I've got you and then you hello yeah I was briefly mentioned this just now but I was curious in the role played by these two aspects that seem to function as a substratum for this whole cycle which is the production and reproduction of nature and the production of human nature how do you conceptualise that as the role that it plays in generating crisis that's my question thank you just over here I think that's quite related actually it was really interesting particularly this idea of infinities and value and anti value there seems to be a clear relationship between wants needs and desires categorisation or definition of whether or not value is value or anti value and I wondered if you thought wants needs and desires were finite or not and what are the implications of your answer for the future of this model in terms of the creation of value and anti value either in theory or in current time and space thanks we'll have at the back there at the very back I'm concerned that your model leaves out the way that capitalism developed in the 20th century in particular the role of the nation state as a factor and inter capitalist and inter imperialist competition between nation states and I'm concerned that that would lead you to minimise the importance of how an important section of the ruling classes in the western countries are mobilising these nationalist right wing populist misogynist movements in Germany, France the US with Trump and so on so if you take your infrastructure policy for Trump I guess I'm thinking of somebody else that had an infrastructure spending policy in the 1930s in Germany whether in that figure the gift of free gift of nature and free gift of human nature can actually be categorised as anti value because that whole system relies on those things not being valued then nature and human nature would be the greatest source among the great source of anti value Okay the woman at the back then Yeah I was wondering if you could share your opinion on what stands development countries should take towards financial liberalisation Thanks and the man in the front in the black did you have your hand up Yeah I was wondering whether you could reflect a bit I was thinking I was reading this morning Polanyi and I do see some sort of connection with this idea of the fictitious commodities and labour and money and the connection with the sort of the three stages here as world production sort of the realisation of value which could be labour and demand and then money and whether you agree with his impression that in different times you will have different balances I think you kind of mentioned it how now we have a primacy of interest and the distribution problems but whether you could expand on that whether you can have different balances in time Thanks and one last question over here Thank you, my question was more to do with the international movement of labour and you talked about sort of the decline in the levels of growth across the world and how that has resulted in the movement of capital, commodities etc I was wondering if you can say something also about the movement of labour and in particular I'm referring to the so-called migration crisis where we are saying the contradictory policies of sort of importing of cheap migrant workers at the same time a very selective sort of migration barrier being set up, thank you Thanks and actually one final question over here Predictions was like over production which might get diverted into arms production I think there was an example of that recently when the Labour Party was discussing Trident and we had some trade unionists saying well we must make Trident submarines at this enormous expense because otherwise it wouldn't have any jobs that seems to be a particularly intellectually discrepanible heart Thanks So we'll give David a few minutes for that Let me talk a little bit about the whole question of relation to nature and human nature and the like Marx at various times did talk about the free gifts of nature and the significance of those free gifts for any economic activity He also talked about the productive capacities of populations particularly their skills their culture, their understanding of various things and at times he ventured into the notion of a species being which was not a theory of the essentialist theory of human nature but was a discovery theory of what potentialities exist within our human nature to construct alternative construct ourselves in alternative ways I've long held about and when I'm writing about cities that one of the big questions is not so much what kind of city we want but what kind of people we want to be because the way we construct cities actually dictates a lot of things to us in terms of what kinds of people we have to be in order to live in that kind of environment what kinds of values we should have and so on so there's a complicated relationship between human nature and the use of our relation to nature and it's not of course a done deal that we simply respond to the requirements of a capitalist social order blindly and without expressing any kind of alternative so that there are of course deep ecology movements and ecological movements that are actually antagonistic to capital precisely because capital demands of us that we utilize nature we turn it into what Heidegger called sort of one big gasoline station and in objecting to that people actively become anti value they become anti the mode of value that capital is developing and I think it's important always to understand in my understanding of the theory of value that Marx is describing capital's theory of value it's not his theory of value it's capital's theory of value and people kind of read Marx's theory of value and get mad as hell at him and say you know God the guy he doesn't take account of women he doesn't take account of this he doesn't take account of that and my response to that is we are but he's just representing what capital is about capital doesn't care what it produces capital doesn't care what use values it sets up or destroys you know so actually what Marx is reflecting is a theory of value which is inherent in the way in which capital works which leads into an interesting kind of political question because because value has such a positive connotation I think a lot of people want to be included in it but Marx is very clear that to be a value producer under capitalism is a misfortune and why on earth would you want to put household labour as a commodity and have wages for it I mean why would you want it to be inside the wages system and the wages system is the problem we should be doing things the other way around we should be taking the good sides of social relations which exist in say household activities and the rest of it and so far as they're not discolored by patriarchy and all those other things we can be critical of but why are we not kind of taking those good aspects of social relations which exist in those environments which are non-commodified and seek to spread them at a greater greater level to the commons around us and you know why don't we take the sort of household as a site where anti-value can be cultivated and actually acted upon and so this is to me and again why wouldn't we take the kind of question of our relation to nature and instead of saying nature contributes to value and these Marxists don't take any notice of that and you say well yeah well that's cause capital doesn't give a shit about nature you know I mean we are actually you know if we want to reconstruct and end up with an unalienated relation to nature we have to actually get beyond capital and out of capital relations so those are the sorts of political questions that come up around around this and this question so this question of nature human nature and and the like is a very broad one obviously but it does have a lot of politics to it on the question of the state and all the rest of it because you know with any framework that you set up of this kind there is always the danger of imagining that it's trying to deal with something that it's not oriented to do my interest in this is then to go on and ask the question what is the space and time of this and when you come into the question of what is the space and time of this you start to get some very very interesting questions for example why is it that we assume there is only one value theory that is appropriate why are we not actually saying there are different value regimes and actually there's a very good reason why Mark said there's only one it's because he assumed a perfectly competitive capitalist society what happens if you have monopoly power in any form and by the way all spatial competition is monopolistic competition therefore the conditions under which Mark's derived his initial theory of value do not hold therefore we have to have an alternative notion of value and one of the things that this does is to start to suggest that in fact the whole history of capitalism has been about competition between alternative and different value regimes and those alternative value regimes are often utilised notions of culture and they use notions of nation and all the rest of it and the state and territoriality and belonging and even at the local level so that if you say what is the value regime of say indigenous populations in Amazonia you'll end up with a different answer than what the value regimes are of say contemporary Sweden and actually a lot of geopolitics is about the attempt to construct distinctive value regimes I mean what's the United States trying to do when it sets up this kind of trans-Pacific partnership it's trying to define a territory which is a value regime in which it itself would be hegemonic in a situation where the US amount of global trade has been declining steadily over the last few years it's trying to set up a territorial structure in which a value regime in which it will be hegemonic in which it will be hegemonic which is antagonistic to both China and the European Union and what do you think Germany is doing within the European Union it's actually kind of struck a value regime within the union of a certain sort and everybody has to obey as it were the autocratic demands of Schorble and all the rest of it I mean so the Greeks are putting the position they are because they are inserted in a particular value regime and that is what it's doing why can't we start thinking about the alternative value regimes and structures and recognize that actually part of this is then set up with this whole kind of question of migration of labour which is a very very very significant part of this but as soon as you get into the question of what's the space and time of all of this suddenly this thing is no longer a map of this kind it's something very radically different it is what Marx describes it begins to describe in the communist manifesto when he's talking about globalization or in those fantastic passages in the Grundrisa where he's talking about the construction of the world market through capital accumulation and capital dynamics and you also have to take into account the fact that capital produces spaces differential rent too is about the the rent that accrues because of investments in the land differential investments in the land have actually produced a rent service in the world which is radically different the investments in the land in the United States are of a different kind than investments in the land in say Central Africa therefore there's a differential rent too to be had out of just the very fact that the United States has created the value regime in the way it has and the value regime is often set up with state power trying to reconfigure it in a certain kind of way so this notion of differential value regimes comes out of the space and time of value and the demographics of it are also extremely interesting so I can make the story respond to some of the questions that you're talking about and on the basis of this but simply by saying what's the space and time of movement that's involved here you cannot have motion without talking about the context of space and time in which that motion is occurring otherwise it's an abstracted notion of motion that's why I pay great attention to Marx's letter to Krugelman when he says the real science begins when you've got the abstract law which you wanted which is this and then you start to see how it asserts itself in practice and when you start to look at how it asserts itself in practice you come up against all of the things that you're talking about but when you when you do start to do it in practice what you find is that actually you get a deeper understanding of this you just don't say oh this was irrelevant you find a deeper understanding of this so that for example in the creation of the relationship between the bond holders and the different value regimes Marx has for instance just take this on money when Marx talks about money he kind of says you know there are lots of local monies and there are lots of currencies around currencies are disaggregated they all have their national emblems and their national clothing and then they strip them off and they go on the world stage and they're world money and there's a difference between world money he says and all of those local money which are the different currencies which exist so currency regimes are disaggregated if currency regimes are disaggregated why can't value regimes be disaggregated because money is a representation of value and if the representation is disaggregated why should we presume that the value which is representing also cannot be disaggregated so I'm interested in that and I think that it does get us down to being able to think of different value regimes and how they work and what the conditions are under which a particular value regime will become hegemonic because this is in effect what's been happening in terms of historical historically I mean if we were having this conference this talk back in the 1980s we would be looking at West Germany and Japan as the dominant hegemonic leaders of what global capitalism was about if you got to the 1990s and the Washington Consensus then it was the United States recently it's been China and China and there's some interesting tell-tale signs by the way I mentioned the way in which the US is trying to set up these trans-Pacific and CAFTA and all those kinds of things which are regional hegemonic value regimes the US is trying to do that but I'm I'm kind of pursuing these sorts of things in this sort of way and yeah it becomes more of a bit of a fight to start to talk about actually how capital uses space and time and how it produces space and time and what that production is all about and how it actually works but I think there are some things could be said on the basis of this and this question of the relationship for example right now one of the crucial questions what's the power of the bond holders versus the power of nation states that's one of the big questions and always you know Bill Clinton's famous R when he came into power and said he wanted to do this and this and that was his economic program and Rubin from Wall Street told him he couldn't do it and he said well why not he said well because Wall Street won't let you and the famous line from Clinton was you mean to say my whole economic program is held hostage to a bunch of fucking bond traders and Rubin said yes and so what did Clinton do he came in promising healthcare, universal healthcare and he gave us NAFTA and the Enderglass Steagle and he gave us the reform of welfare as you know it he gave us all of the neoliberal stuff I mean this is the power of the bond holders actually being exerted over the nation states and I think that that is where the national thing comes in and the the kind of the global thing comes in so you know I have some ideas about this but they're very loose ideas and ones that I can't actually kind of certify it with lots of data and all this kind of stuff but that's the sort of way of thinking that I think has to be applied to this kind of thing so you just don't say this is all there is this is the beginning point Mark's kind of very clear about that this is the sort of beginning point and once you've got the beginning point you can then start to ask some deeper and more profound questions and you go on and on and on and that is a never ending process that's a sort of a bad infinity in the other direction because you can never get to the end of it