 David Harvey, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm going to start with the most profound, most important question of all. Very briefly, what is capitalism? Capitalism is a social system which attempts to meet people's needs through a system of production and circulation of capital which is profit-seeking, which is constantly expanding and which is always involved in class relations and reproduction of class relations. And what's the difference between a capitalist mode of production and a socialist one? In a socialist one, you would have use values on the idea of use values dominating In a purely socialist system, the exchange value aspects would disappear whereas the theory in undercapitalism is that everything has to be pushed through the market because the market is the most efficient way in which you can provide people with their shirts and shoes and education and healthcare and everything else. Of course it turns out that the market actually favours certain people and disfavours other people. So actually the market system is a great way in which the rich can get richer and the poor can get poorer. So socialism produces things for use values? Yes. Capitalism produces things for exchange values. What's the difference between use and exchange value? With a use value, I have a shirt, I want to wear it, I have shoes I want to wear. I eat porridge for breakfast, I have a house that I live in. These are all different use values which contribute to my daily life and my daily life rests on having a good supply of those use values and me having access to those use values. That access however is controlled in a market society by how much money I have. So if I want to have a house, very nice to have a house but in this contemporary market you need hell of a lot of money to get a house. So your access to housing is limited by the fact that you don't have enough money to get the housing so you get homeless people or people currently living doubled up in small cramped quarters because the exchange value that is demanded of them is such that their own incomes are not sufficient to cover it and so some people will be hungry, some people won't have enough money to buy food so there's a rationing which goes on through the exchange value system and the thing that really irritates me a lot about capitalism is how much has to go through this exchange value system so education has become a commodity which you have to buy, healthcare has become a commodity these should be human rights not commodities which are rationed through the market system. So that word commodity, for most people everybody uses that word commodity we hear it every day of the week but for somebody with a Marxist understanding of the world of capitalism what does it specifically mean? It means the thing, the physical thing which is the shirt or the shoe or the porridge or whatever or the house it means the physical thing but the physical thing contains something which is common to all things and Marx asks the question what is it that they all have in common and the answer he gives is that they're all products of human labour so the thing that makes them equivalent is the amount of human labour that goes into making a shirt versus shoes versus houses and the more human labour that goes into a commodity the more valuable it is, the more value it has and that value is generally expressed in monetary terms but Marx makes clear that value is a social relation and therefore has in itself no direct measure so the measure of value is the money and the money can often betray the value for various kinds of reasons so the Marxist would have a rather critical view of how exchange value can betray value at the same time as it restricts people's access to use values because they don't have enough money to buy whatever it is they might need to have a decent daily life So we're talking today in specific regard to this book your new book, Marx's Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason we interviewed you the last time you did the book on contradictions was it the 17 contradictions of contradictions to capital? Excellent book, most people who are aware of your work have come to you through your lectures on capital your guides to them published with Verso, this is with Profile you have made a name for yourself on being the go-to voice increasingly in the Anglophone world on Marx you come from a geography background but now you're I think the preeminent voice is fair to say on the writings of Marx after 30-40 years of teaching Marx, of reading Marx do you not get bored of it or is there always something new that you're learning is the thinking that deep and that important well one of the great things about Marx is he's a very complex writer and so you're always finding new wrinkles in what he's doing but the other thing is of course the world is changing when I was teaching Marx in 1970, volume one of Capital was pretty hard to make relevant to daily life because you still had a welfare state around a lot of state intervention and Marx doesn't cover all of that but of course since then we've had a kind of well we've got to have more market, more market, more market and by the time you get to the 1990s actually Marx's Capital, volume one was beginning to tell a story which was right on your doorstep and right now it's right on the money in terms of explaining what the hell is going on in the world Right, so that's a retaught that you often hear critics of Marxism say well look that was relevant to the 19th century they have a chronological understanding of relevance but what you're saying is the complete opposite that actually Yeah, it's more relevant because we're back in the sort of story that Marx tells about what happens in competitive market economies but it's also more relevant because when Marx was writing Capital was dominant only in a very small corner of the world you know sort of Britain, Western Europe and maybe east of the coast of the United States but the rest of the world was untouched by it except through merchant trading now of course Capital is everywhere established I mean so there it is in China, there it is in Russia there it is in India, there it is in Indonesia so in some ways geographically it's become far more widespread so I think right now I'd argue that reading Marx is far, far more significant now than it was in 1957 Couldn't agree more, yeah We've seen a deluge of polls in the last couple of years since really 2015 in particular particularly in the UK it's really interesting but also in the US where people say and of course polling has its limits as a means of data collection and analysis but people are saying we don't really trust capitalism, we don't think it is going to lead to improved standards of living and actually there is some polling where people say they have more trust in socialism there was a recent poll in the UK in 2016 I think where people said they had more faith in socialism than capitalism to deliver rising living standards and this is particularly evident amongst the young both in the US and in the UK For you what explains that? Firstly the losing of confidence in capitalism but then amongst the young this turn to new ideas Well what Marx shows is that the closer you get to a free market capitalism and the competitive free market capitalism the greater the level of inequality that will be experienced and this was contrary to what Adam Smith suggested because Adam Smith suggested that the more you organized a market society the more that society would develop in a way that would be a benefit to all but what Marx showed was no it is not going to benefit all it is going to benefit the capitalist class and it is going to make conditions worse for much of the working class Now we have had 30 odd 40 years of people preaching us that only let the market work and everything is going to be fine we are all going to be better off and it is going to be more efficient and all the rest of it so we have had that being preached to us again and again and again for 30 years as the welfare state was dismantled and other things were dismantled people still were waiting to deliver the goods and then I think by the time you get to around 2000 it became clear it wasn't going to deliver the goods and in fact when people looked around they kind of said some people would become filthy rich on this system and we have got nothing and so I think from about then on you start to see people realizing that this is a story they have been told which is advantageous to the ultra rich and the big corporations and they are not going to believe that story anymore and then they kind of look around and say where is another story well there are various stories some people went off into religious forms some people took themselves off and said we are going to live in communes or something of that kind but then of course somebody who has a theory who kind of says why this happens which happens to be Marx suddenly people kind of say oh yeah there is a theory there that explains why this all happened to us and so I could write a book on the brief history of neoliberalism and say this is what happened to you and then people read it and they recognize it they really recognize it and they kind of go oh yeah okay well in that case there is a problem with capitalism we should do something about capitalism and then the question of what to do about capitalism starts to come on the agenda I mean the alt-right in the US the far right they call digests and then believes ideas of ethno-nationalism you know racist ideas fundamentally they call it red-pilling because they have this new ideological explanation for what are observable things in the world and for me like they call it red-pilling it's a stupid term but for me when you read chapters 1 and 2 of capital all of a sudden you go my goodness I know how this will not how but why this was produced your glasses, these trainers that camera and how they all have a relationship not just to one another but also to us consumers and producers so yeah that's why I always say to people if you don't ever want to read Karl Marx because I made the mistakes that all undergraduates do I read the 1844 manuscripts and the manifesto bits and bobs but of course capital is so long and so daunting that you don't want to do it and as soon as I read the first two chapters I thought god I wish I'd come to it sooner I think you're partly responsible for that but building on that if you look at the movements beneath Bernie Sanders, beneath Jeremy Corbyn and the Anglophone world they seem to me more Marxist in orientation the base I'm not talking about necessarily the politicians themselves but the base especially again amongst the young this is reflective of the polling they seem more Marxist than social democratic that is to say they understand that there are structural limits to the economic system we have do you think that that is in part a result of not just your work but I would say N notes in the US a journal, I'd say Paul Mason a couple of quite influential public intellectuals who in the Anglophone world have made this just in the space of 5 to 10 years a really a relatively common analysis of of the world I actually would downplay the role of intellectuals and academics in this whole thing I think there's a sense that comes from the base and if the sense is coming from the base then people like myself we're obliged to try articulate what that's about and why it's about what it is and I think right now what you've got is you've got populations who are deeply alienated now alienation is a good Marxist term it talks about the way in which workers are alienated from their labour it talks about how we're alienated from nature it talks about how we're alienated from the conditions of daily life we're alienated from political process which says supposed to be democratic but we know damn well we don't have anything to say about anything so there's a tremendous alienation in society right now so and I think that tremendous alienation creates a massive population that is seething with anger and seething with the requirement that somebody say something about address this question of alienation and it's at that point that somebody like myself can come in and say well look I think there's a reason to try to explain this alienation I'm not the only one who can say these things because and there are many other sources of alienation because there are forms of racial domination and gender domination there are issues of that kind as well so it's at that point where it seems to me that the academic can step in and do something I don't think we lead I think we follow and I think why my interpretation of Marx I think is possibly being more influential now in academic circles is because I've always been interested in urbanization and I've always been questioned about urban daily life and uneven geographical development in other words I'm interested in what's going on on the ground and my Marx is the Marx who helps me explain what's going on on the ground whereas a lot of Marxists are interested in the theory as theory work with the theory as theory and have a hard time relating it to the ground whereas I think what I have to say is integrated very much with an understanding of daily life particularly in cities and I think it's interesting that a lot of the social movements that have occurred over the last 15-20 years have been urban social movements the uprising in Gazy Park even the Occupy movement the sort of revolutionary movements that occurred in Brazilian cities in 2013 so there's a lot of things going on at that level which are not normally approached through the Marxist lens but my Marxism connects to that world and what's happening and I think because of that connection I think it is saying something about conditions of life for the mass of the population and people then pick up on it but there's a quote from Milton Friedman in the introduction to capitalism and freedom and he talks about the role of intellectuals and he says it's to keep ideas alive at the moment in which they have very little popular resonance whatsoever and clearly in that regard you've played a very important role haven't you? Oh yeah, keeping it alive was pretty hard in the early 1990s for example everybody said Marxism is dead and I have to keep on saying I'm not dead yet you know that's the kind of way in which keeping things alive is actually one very important role I think that we do play. So for the rest of the interview we'll be talking about a lot of the things that Mark got right or what we think he got right What did he get wrong? I wouldn't say he's got things wrong so much as he left so much unfinished it's annoying intensely annoying because he gets halfway into something and he leaves it aside he made a lot of assumptions about in his studies and he assumed away certain kind of questions for example he's fully aware that our alienated relation to nature is problematic under capitalism and capitalism is very destructive towards our natural environment and he understands those things but the amount of time he spent talking about this was kind of minuscule and I think that or it's critically important we know that capital survives by destroying its sources of wealth and the environment but then he leaves it at that so there's an incompleteness in his work and I think that that's one of the things that those of us who work in that tradition have an obligation to try to complete what he's saying and of course there is some very good work now on Mark's and environmental questions and it would apply to things like the domestic sphere what goes on in the domestic sphere household labor those sorts of things Mark says basically well I'm not going to deal with that because capital doesn't care who's about it capital actually merely goes on and just gives the workers their wage and says you get on and figure out how to reproduce yourself with the wage so Mark is reflecting back to us some of the practices that exist under capitalist society so there's some good reasons but it leaves things a lot of things empty so he doesn't talk enough about domestic issues he doesn't talk enough about gender questions and there is a kind of critique of Mark's about that and it's correct in a way which is that he did not take his analysis into those sorts of terrains that you should have taken them into the way you phrase capital because it's a critique of the ideas of Malthus, Ricardo, Smith I think that's a good explanation as to why but very briefly for those watching what is the relationship between a circuit of valorisation workers selling their labour to a capitalist who makes commodities to make a profit what's the relationship between that process and household labour as you call it well the worker is in the first instance needs to be healthy enough to be able to participate in the labour process and it needs to be enough of them so the reproduction of a working class and that class having a commodity labour power which is available to the capitalist at a reasonable price and is in surplus so that the price can be kept way down that is a very important aspect of the dynamics of this social system we call capitalism the other thing about the worker course are consumers so Marx talks rather reluctantly actually at a certain point in capital about the way in which workers are forced into becoming what he calls consumers who are going to satisfy the requirement of the market for the capitalist so there is among the working class also a process which Marx does not get into in great detail as Marx mentions enough to say that he thought was important which is the production of once needs and desires in a population so what goes on in social reproduction is both the articulation of once needs and desires through daily life and also the reproduction of the labourer as somebody who is the bearer of labour power as a commodity and therefore is of what goes on in the reproduction process is a very important thing some of it gets commodified too how much of the working class these days instead of cooking for themselves as they did maybe a hundred years ago go to McDonald's or Kentucky Fried Chicken and the kids do the same so there is a lot of commodification of what used to be inside of the household also going on so that segment of the circulation process which is where the circulation of capital which is doing one set of things connects it to this reproduction process of the working class and it's a complicated kind of relation but it's a very interesting one to look at historically you've got a gift I think for talking about these concepts you know you use quite evocative imagery and in this book you talk about the hydrological cycle I think it's a very effective one and that is similar I think it was in the lectures and you talk about precisely this the relationship between reproductive, social reproduction household work which makes possible wage labour it's almost like one cog which allows another cog to spin and that stuff comes out of Rosa Luxemburg effectively doesn't it Well there's somebody who comes up but Marx has it I mean just take for example the production of once needs and desires I mean in volume one of Capital Marx sort of particularly in the third chapter he starts he says well commodities are in love with money but you know being Shakespeare and he says but the course of true love never did run smooth and so he then gets into this whole debate about how new once needs and desires get created and he deals with that in the economic and philosophic manuscripts research as well and when you think about it you say the state of our once needs and desires if we think of it as a historical product where did it come from did it come from you know one day we sat down and we dreamed and we said oh I think I'd like a lawn mower you know and you kind of go what for well because they've built suburban housing and I'm expected to mow my lawn every Sunday you know so the creation of once needs and desires through the history of Capital has had an incredible impact upon how the whole world is organized and how we live our daily lives and Capital of course is expert at organizing society in such a way that you know we suddenly find ourselves absolutely it's absolutely necessary I have a cell phone absolutely necessary it becomes a necessity in five ten years there was a time when we lived without cell phones and now you know it's very difficult to live without them so you create a world and of course then what happens is you get new models of cell phones so actually consumerism is being picked up and transformed very fast so everything becomes obsolete almost before you've got it and the same is true with computers I mean I have an old computer on my desk which is from about twenty years ago people look at it and say that's an antique well this is an interesting definition of an antique and if you don't get a new computer about once every two years you know you're kind of obviously not so this is the world we've created and it's about speeding things up accelerating things but that is essential for the dynamics of Capital to live so yeah very briefly somebody who may be attracted to right wing ideas or even sort of moderate social democratic ideas that acceleration and the ideas of built in obsolescence are fundamental to capitalism because it constantly has to expand value and motion what you call value and motion and it actually spills overall over the case I mean I live in an academic world where when I actually first got into it and you know I've been in a long time if you did maybe two books in a lifetime you were considered to being a bit pushy now if you don't publish a book every year you know and you have publishers breathing down your neck saying where's the next book and if you don't publish a book every other year people think you died you know and so there's a tremendous pressure to sort of accelerate everything and the result is life is very tense and alienation comes in a lot too because we don't get time to enjoy ourselves I mean the studies of pre-capitalist societies in some of those societies the working day was four hours can you imagine a world in which you only had to work for four hours and then the rest of the time you know people would sit around and talk and you know whatever they wanted and you know why don't we have more free time we don't have free time we have all of this labour saving equipment and less and less free time I believe there is some evidence to suggest that women in medieval Britain may actually have been taller they have a few bodies that sort of point towards this than women around the time of the industrial revolution because they had less nutrition and at the same time it's having more nutrition which obviously means more calories despite greater agricultural productivity hundreds of years later they also had I think 150 holidays or something I mean you all know this more than I will this is obviously has an impact on psychology and the World Health Organization is predicting that by 2030 depression will be the number one I can't remember the precise wording but the number one health issue globally not just in Britain or North America but globally do you think there's a relationship then between this acceleration and daily life the constant increase of value in motion and fundamental changes to the human psyche which are profound I think I mean there has to be a relation I mean we just can't be unchanged by the speed with which things are going on around us and the transformations that are going on around us I mean and even you know we live in this crazy world in the United States now with the president tweeting some crazy thing and on Thursday we're fearing there's going to be a nuclear exchange with North Korea and there's going to be a nuclear war with the apocalypse three days later we've forgotten it because we're in some silly little tweet about him hitting Hillary Clinton with a golf ball you know I mean so the insanity I mean the insanity of a lot of this is I think real pressing right now and I think that every mode of production creates a personality to go with it I mean Gramsci talked about American and Fordism and he talked about the typical Fordist worker who's a different kind of human being from the artisan laborer and of course now we're down to you know the flexible specialization and precarious labor and we have a different personality that goes with it and everything is temporary and everything is ephemeral and everything is moving very very fast and it creates psychological stresses and it creates alienations and I think that society right now needs to sort of step back and think about well is this the right way to go is this the kind of people we want to be and there is a debate going on about that it's very interesting being in the United States I mean some of it's been moralizing people kind of say well if the persona of the future is Donald Trump do we really want to be like that is that the kind of human being we want to be and a lot of people are saying no it's not this is not this is not who we are as Americans I mean there's a little phrase coming up again and again and again and some of it is all sort of hot air and moralizing but I think there's a real profound sense that our species being is being transformed into something which is rather ugly and the authoritarian personality is coming out and we're seeing kind of the neo-fascist stuff come up and you know so I think there's a whole and it's all connected and this is one of the things I think that we academics can try and do is to sort of pinpoint some of these connections and say that yeah there's depression there's alienation but look at the context in which this is occurring maybe we should change that context and that will relieve some of the pressure which is on you psychologically so I want to return to the issue of attention the new economy psychology in a second but let's talk about debt and this is something to talk about extensively in the new book it's beyond dispute that we have record levels of household debt, financial sector debt, banks and so on and sovereign debt with nations why is that? Why is everybody in more debt more or less than ever before? I think it has to do with the need to keep the system expanding. Capital is about growth it has to grow at 3% a year and that's a compound rate of growth which means that it's actually going to accelerate over time and become faster and faster it's got to do that and the only way it can do that is by actually discounting the future into the present and the way you do that is you issue debt and debt is a claim on future labor so what it is is if you're in debt to me then you've got to work it off and so what we're doing to students and others putting them in debt is putting them in situations where they have to work it off and that means the freedom of choice disappears and this is what I call anti-value being mobilized by capital to make sure that value gets produced so corporations are in debt they've got to get paid off and so they've got to go into production or they've got to go into activity somehow or other to find enough money to pay off their debt so the acceleration of debt has a lot to do with the fact that the only way in which capital can satisfy its requirement or a 3% growth rate forever is by increasing the money supply and increasing the money that's available and one of the ways in which you do that is to issue more debt and in effect we've got into what's called a kind of Ponzi economy where we borrow a lot of money this year to pay off our last year's debt and then we pay even more money next year to pay off this year's debt so the sort of the piling up of debt right now and I think it's very interesting that Mexico when it got into debt in 1982 I think it got into debt with about 80 or 90% of the debt with 80 or 90% of GDP and this was considered catastrophic now the whole world is in debt to the tune of something like 225 or 240% of the world's GDP and nobody does anything everybody kind of says well this is normal well even Germany right has you know allegedly frugal Germany has 70-80% in GDP most people say that's perfectly good that's fine that's absolutely wonderful but what's going on for instance in China is amazing the amount of debt in China has accelerated hugely and it's now up to around 250% of GDP in China the only thing about the Chinese is that they're in debt in their own money which means they could just print more of their own money if they want to you know they're not going to get caught out like Greece got caught out so this is a this is I think a very important point to make about contemporary capitalism that what is the driving force of contemporary capitalism is no longer the greed of the individual entrepreneur or the desire to make a buck I mean yeah that's still there and it's no longer the state sort of organizing welfare and organizing the commanding heights of the economy as they did in social democracy with nationalized industries in the 1960s it's no longer that the big thing since the 1970s has been the creation of this debt economy which locks people in to a future so you know we're looking at the future where everything is pretty much foreclosed around the fact that we're going into a world of debt peonage you, I and everybody else is debt peonage this was a subjectivity that had to be really assiduously sort of cultivated from the 1950s, 1960s people didn't want to get into debt and there's often a moral critique of that you know from the right they would say well if you can't afford it don't take out the debts but what you're saying is well actually the fact that everybody's in debt is fundamental to the continued growth under capitalism and of course it becomes a mechanism of survival there's often this phrase about too big to fail well I even had a friend once who said his plan was to get up so much debt that the banks couldn't possibly bankrupt him and he did it and it was a phenomenal kind of thing I mean he just borrowed millions and millions and millions and then things were going bad and the banks were kind of going well we can't we've got to keep him going somehow there's a line on that isn't there say if you owe 100 pounds to the bank that's your problem if you owe them a million that's their problem exactly, exactly and so people of the psychology of this is very different, I mean I grew up in a world where being indebted was a bad thing I didn't even want to be indebted by a house when I first got into and finally I got indebted rather late in life I was everything pointed in that way and by the way I was being told I was being financially irrational by not going into debt and I kind of said well I like not being indebted but you know so these things take over and we now live in a society where almost everybody in the younger generation is used to running up debt on their credit cards running up debt to buy an automobile running up debt by housing running up debt with department stores and getting different credit cards and using one credit card to pay off another credit card so that economy is kind of becoming incredibly sophisticated and it is a future foreclosed and you talk about capitalism needing growth of 3% a year I mean anything less than 3% at the global level is defined as a recession isn't it you've not just plucked that number out of thin air no no 3% is generally you know people kind of it seems to be the financial press is sort of alright if it's 3% it's okay if it's 2% things are getting pretty sluggish you know if it's only 1.5% we're in trouble if it's 0% we're in a crisis so that's the sort of story and what's the relationship between increasingly indebted economies and automation many workers lost their jobs in manufacturing because of automation and they were thrown out of the labor force and they had good paying jobs they now come out and instead of being steel workers with a unionized job they're now sort of in a security guard or something like that learning not very much and yet they've got to consume how are they going to consume well the answer was give them you know credit cards so what we see is that the share of wages in national income has gone down almost everywhere from the 1970s onwards a slippery slope just goes down like this and nearly all the data at the same time as the consumerism amongst the workers goes up because they're more and more using the credit card and so they managed to maintain their standard of living by you know and at some point or rather they start playing games as they did in the housing market in the United States and then they get caught and then they go bankrupt and you know the stories pretty savage so I think that the debt economy became one of the ways in which austerity politics which would make the market less and less vibrant gets countered by the debt which actually makes the market much more you know viable for systematic capitalist consumption I mean in reality we've been having declining living standards since arguably 2000 but that's been mitigated to a significant extent hasn't it by things like equity withdrawal from housing greater indebtedness but also the fact that the global labour market after 1990 it doubles so you can give your workers pretty low wage increases but because consumer durables are so cheap life still feels pretty good for them doesn't it but we're coming to the end of that now aren't we that episode almost of capitalism from let's say 1991 to 2008 it doesn't feel like there's another moment like that we can't double the global labour market I don't know one of the things I'm very careful about predictions about what happens in capitalism it's a very wily beast it shifts and I don't know actually to me one of the big mysterious things right now is what's happening in China and how the Chinese are handling this because China's economy is now the biggest in the world by some measures and if not the second biggest in the world then what happens in China is going to be crucial to global capitalism over the next 20 years and it's pretty hard to be very certain about exactly what happens in China most people have been betting on the idea there's going to be a financial crisis an over production crisis in China but they've been saying that for about the last 7 or 8 years what you see is 6 months where it seems to go down and everybody says here it is and then the communist party steps in and back it comes again and so I'm not sure what's going to happen on that front in the long run yeah you're right I mean I thought just personally about the housing market in the United States was going to crash in 2003 I thought it was and I was sort of saying it's going to crash and then it got to 2004 I said the housing market is going to crash and then it got to 2005 and I said the housing market is going to crash in 2006 the housing market is going to crash so actually in 2006 I bought a place and the housing market crashed where did you buy? in Manhattan you weren't in Nevada or somewhere no no no no no but the point was I wasn't buying because I was convinced the housing market was going to crash in 2003 and then I got to the point where so don't rely on me for any good predictions they're always disastrous I never get the exchange rate right if I go some place and I expect to get the favorable exchange rate I always find I get there and almost the day I get there the exchange rate goes the opposite direction sticking with China you detail some really incredible data around consumption of concrete and an array of things and you say more or less that had China responded to the crisis in 2007-8 in a different way yes we've seen obviously stagnation in the UK in particular the Eurozone but more or less we would have seen a global downturn of a very different kind to what we have seen can you speak about that briefly the role of China in keeping global capitalism more or less on an even keel for the last decade China has a sort of insulated economy in some ways I mean obviously has powerful relationships for the rest of the world the crisis in 2007-2008 because of the collapse of the US consumer market so all of the export industries just crashed and now China is very nervous about having widespread unemployment so what in effect they did was to say we've got to employ all these people how are we going to do it so they launch this huge program of infrastructure investment urbanization and you know all sorts of large huge kind of projects for example in 2008 the Chinese had 0 miles of high speed train network now they have 15,000 miles they've created 15,000 miles of high speed train network in about 10 years I mean this is astonishing kind of stuff this is going on all over China now when you do that you need raw materials you need steel you need copper you need whoever was producing copper around the world whoever was producing iron ore around the world came out of the recession of 2003 pretty well so Australia for example is sending all of these raw materials and minerals and that to China and so Australia didn't have much of a crash in 2008 because of that Chile most of Latin America didn't because they were also producing soybeans and they were producing iron ore and copper so all of those countries which were producing raw materials for the China market did very well because the Chinese demand was sending prices up these countries were doing pretty well and that part of global capitalism sort of didn't suffer too much in 2007 because that's what I mean that's where the growth has been coming from the Eurozone or the UK to a lesser extent the US this is where the big growth now there was a recession in 2015-16 and this went down a bit those countries that were doing extremely well up until 2015-16 were countries like Brazil suddenly Brazil goes into a crash because the China trade is no longer as buoyant commodity prices are going down Chile has problems, Australia has some problems so everything that's attached to the China thing is kind of very much dependent upon the continuation of this Chinese boom and as I've said you go through these phases the Chinese boom seems like it's ended and it's brought down as an attempt to curb steel production and then all of a sudden it goes up again and so suddenly Brazil is back and feeling okay so what's going on in China is I think a very important aspect of what's going on in the global capitalist economy right now and my own view is that they save global capitalism from something even more disastrous than happened in the 1930s let's move to Britain for a second we had a bit of news out over the summer that productivity now I don't know if you've seen this I didn't see this until last week productivity is now lower than it was in 2007 which is to say that an hour of work in Britain today produces less output than it did 10 years ago now that has no precedent nor does the fact that we've seen a huge decline in real pay in Britain people in this country often by the media are told that the crisis is far worse in places like Italy Spain and France but by these measures that's just not true why has Britain got such specific problems in regards to productivity and wages I just want to add one thing to that that actually life expectancy in Britain has gone down too so all of these indicators suggest that the mass of the people in Britain are not doing very well at all part of the problem of course is that the city of London has been doing great so the city of London is fine and the financial services and all of that so you know people talk about two Britons well there is two Britons and that group now in financial services productivity is very hard to measure a lot of it has of course to do with speed so that the speed of transactions on the stock exchange and so on and now down to milliseconds I don't know what they are so but the other thing is that improvements in productivity these days are actually globally harder and harder to come by because productivity is usually about measuring things like building a house, building an automobile this kind of thing and the technologies which were very very vibrant from the 1980s onwards have essentially ran out of steam and so there is a growing sense in the United States in particular and this would be true of Britain as well is that the productivity growth machine is petering out and that we are in for a very low productivity phase not lower productivity necessarily but no improvements in productivity so building on that idea of technological change and moving down in productivity something that is different to before a few years ago it was quite trendy to talk about cognitive capitalism and of course the output of cognitive capitalism are quite difficult to measure often and there was a new almost revolutionary subject Antonio Negri talks about this like the Italian guys talk about this and Harriet is cognitive capitalism a new kind of capitalism or is it just a lot of nonsense does Marx explain the contemporary composition of work and its relationship to technology well I think that knowledge is obviously a very important feature of any capitalist production system and free gifts of human history and the creation of knowledge are crucial to the functioning of capital so one would not say that knowledge is irrelevant but as far as Marx is concerned it's a free good I mean we don't pay a royalty every time we appeal to Newton's theory of gravitation or something like that or other engineering findings this is all a free good what Marx does say however is that when knowledge gets incorporated in the machine then the need for knowledge on the part of the worker disappears so that in a sense the worker can become more or less a trained gorilla or a zombie or whatever you want so the conditions of labor are likely to become less and less attractive and beyond that the fewer laborers may be employed in productive activity so Marx does say that look there's an interesting problem here but when you start to look at some of the countervailing forces and this that the expansion of the labor force in some areas which are low productivity has been very remarkable under capitalism but we just don't recognize them because they're not in factories we can't go to a factory and say there's the working class I sort of talk about I stand on the corner of 86th Street and 2nd Avenue in New York and what do I see I see lots of restaurants around well I'm making hamburgers why is that not value creating as opposed to making automobiles but if you look at all the hamburger stores and little places making soups and coffee and all this kind of stuff this is very productive activity but it's a different kind of productive activity and it's labor intensive and so we've got a lot of labor intensive activities going you know developing which are very hard to turn into high productivity and automated thing now artificial intelligence maybe can come in it maybe that I'll go and be able to go to one of these places and press a button and say I want a hamburger and some you know it'll come out the other end who knows there are those real possibilities but I don't think that cognitive the cognitive side of things is in itself productive of value I think that it's very important as a condition for the production of value that we have knowledge available but the corporation of knowledge in the machine is itself a very specific aspect of what the cognitive capitalists should be talking about which are not after all if knowledge in itself was value creating we'd all be sitting around just creating knowledge and any old kind of article about this and any old novel about that and they say hey I've made value and then of course at some point or other somebody's going to say well what's the exchange value of it and everybody says well this is load of crap you're writing nobody wants to read this so it's not so I think the cognitive capitalism stuff was kind of a bit of a flash in the pan that was connected very much to what was happening in Italy and the Italian economy and of course it doesn't apply at all to what's happening in China and what's happening in Bangladesh and all the rest of it so it seems to me a bit of an Italian fad if I dare call it that there was also a more general tendency in 1992 the first sort of instance of the word post-capitalism or post-capitalist comes from Peter Drucker and he talks about post-capitalist organisations in 1992 you have ideas around endogenous growth theory around the same time so these broadly say the same thing they say that now in terms of capitalism knowledge is now the primary driver of new value and this guy now is the head of the World Bank I think, Roma the big endogenous growth theory guy and when we're in a world where genetically edited E. coli viruses might be able to switch off Alzheimer's I mean that is only pure information isn't it and that is clearly generative of value it's not labour it's not resources so what would you call it E. coli is a free gift of nature but we're editing it to have very very incredible consequences for human health so how do Marxists understand that well the remedy for E. coli is itself once it's produced it's no longer it should not be a commodity at all it should be freely available to everybody who has a problem and that's that now how much value goes in in terms of the research this kind of stuff that gets to the point where you've got the genetic code that allows you to do certain things yeah that's all productive of value but once it's produced then the reproduction costs of the vaccine or whatever it is that's going to do this the reproduction are close to zero and therefore should be a free good I mean that's how I would understand it and I want to look at it not denying the fact that there is a labour process going on in terms of technology and actually Marx does talk about this when he kind of says you know at a certain point technology becomes a business and when you talk about technology as a business you're no longer looking at a particular kind of factory that needs a new technology what you're looking at is somebody who comes up with a generic technology like the steam engine which could be used all over the place for different reasons and the same would be true of the computer and the same would be true of data analysis and all the other things that we're seeing right now so these kinds of activities I think are crucial to the way in which life is lived but they're no longer embedded as it were in the further circulation of capital as value they are as I said free goods which should be available to everybody speaking of fads and data you'd often hear the refrain from the financial classes that data is the new oil data is the resource does that make any sense or well data is very useful I'm not against data I think data is great and lots of good analysis of data is fine and I like the data that gets there that makes the traffic likes works better so I can drive around London without too many traffic jams fine I'm always fine with that I was going to ask you a question is it value or is it anti-value and the people watching this will have to read your book to understand what we're talking about here if it's data that's used in order to allow predictive analysis of future behavior sure that's anti-value isn't it no data is just data and how you use it it's a raw material of certain kind so you simply amass a mass of raw material and then laying out a lot of coal on the ground and then kind of saying ok the coal is there now what are you going to do with it and now the big question is what do you do with the data but the data if it is data that's gleaned all by Google or Facebook from your consumer habits that's a result of application of human intelligence that's quite a natural resource is it well human intelligence in terms of your own Facebook it's a human intelligence is a gift of nature is a gift of human nature and that's Mark's point about the intelligence inside of our heads is something that comes from our human nature I mean he says about you know with he talks about the way in which works of art he says just works of art are done out of human nature they are like a silkworm makes silk they do it of their own nature that human beings invent things of their own nature and therefore this is not value production this is just people being active doing things and all the rest of it it's not value producing becomes value producing when it becomes integrated with the quality production system which it is if you're on Facebook or Google right well it gets involved and there's an extraction of rent which goes on here which is a rent on what you have done the knowledge of what you have done that's the big data which comes on but my main objection to this is you know let's think of all the things that you can't get data on and the trouble with the big data stuff is it assumes that if you can't measure it doesn't exist what about alienation what about all of those things how do you measure alienation and actually isn't alienation one of the key features of our contemporary economy give me the big data set that tells us all about alienation maybe they could right maybe they could put wearables or synapses neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin were produced he's alienated he's depressed they could probably do all that sort of stuff but alienation in terms of what people do with it is not easily and actually what's going on with Google and all the rest of it is again the kind of creation of scenarios of alienated labour and alienating labour and the interesting thing here is a lot of the production these days has been shifted to the consumer so we become what we're going to go called prosumers that is we go to the airport and we check ourselves in we go to the supermarket we check ourselves out we actually have to do a lot of the work and increasingly what capital is doing is kind of acting more and more as a frontier and saying alright we got this situation we got these systems all set up now you check yourself in and do the work and then we'll extract the rents capital is changing and it's getting more sophisticated about these things and you can see how gains in productivity on this are not necessarily gains in productivity of physical output they're gains in productivity in the sense of actually extracting surplus value from the whole of the population by frontier activities and in many ways capitalism is becoming much more about a frontier society a great example of the assumption economy is solar and solar energy and sort of the seers of modern capitalism so something like a Jeremy Refkin say this is phenomenal we'll have distributed energy everybody will be able to produce their own energy what you're saying is of course they'll be able to generate their energy they'll have to maintain their local energy infrastructure but this will still mean in fact a greater amount of value is extracted and going towards rent seekers right so we've talked about attention we've talked about data I want to stick with the idea of the attention before we start you said you know what's the attention economy I've just made it up really it's a concept in Tiziana over in Italian sort of Marxist feminist talks about it the attention economy is interesting for me because in your book here you outline three moments in which capital as value in motion is doing its thing in valorisation either production of value people can understand that people in factorism very easily imagined in circulation and then in realisation at the point of consumption and it seems to me that with the attention economy there's a contradiction between the valorisation of capital and the realisation of capital which is to say Cal Newport talks about this in the book on deep work and he says I don't go I don't have a Facebook account I don't use my phone and I'm incredibly productive because I'm not constantly being seduced by all these you know little dopamine hits of notifications or buy this or look at this or today's story about Donald Trump being an idiot and it seems to me there is this profound contradiction between competing elements of the capitalist class where Facebook what one thing are your attention but then simultaneously that undermined your ability to do productive work at the point of valorisation I'm interested to know what your take is on this because it seems to me quite remarkable that even today the most important piece of fixed capital of these right and I've got a PhD I've been in education for 25 years and yet capitalism has given me one of these things which makes me bloody useless and it completely undermines all of that work so what's your explanation for that because I mean for me if you're thinking about capitalism as a system which is trying to create more value, generate greater outputs it seems a contradiction which I can't quite grasp well I guess there's almost a classic way to look at this from Mark's perspective which is that on the one hand capital should be producing more and more value because it needs to do that in order to to guarantee its future expansion the measure of value is money can you expand the money without expanding the value does money betray value and I think there's a strong case right now to say that money is betraying value and it's interesting that I was reading some you know China stuff the other day and the Chinese understand it this way that on August the 15th 1971 Richard Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard after that there was no discipline behind global finance and then the question arises well what's world money when we've lost gold the US managed to get that and here I put some of my own stuff that it managed to make sure that the dollar became the standard for the world and it did it in a couple of ways one was it went to Saudi Arabia that had all this the surplus oil and had a lot of money sloshing around basically you've got to recycle that money inside of the United States and so all of the oil money came back to the investment bankers in New York City and the investment bankers got to play with it the second thing was they said to the Saudis you only write the oil contracts in dollars not in any other currency and that meant that the petrodollar as it were became the global currency at the time and then people could start playing with it and currencies were moving around and then people could start to make money off you know the currency movements the famous one was George Soros betting against the British pound in the exchange rate mechanism in 1992 and he borrowed billions and he bought Deutsche Marks and then the pound gets devalued and he then converts Deutsche Marks back into pounds and of course he's made over a billion pounds in three days ok well this is this is a fantastic sort of way to make money and when you tell somebody this everybody says oh yeah that's a good idea but then the Chinese looking at this kind of thing are saying well actually right now money is being made in the west mainly through mechanisms of this kind and this is what the main you know players in the west are doing they're not actually interested in making things anymore they're interested in playing the financial markets and coming out of that and then the Chinese kind of say look what happened in Southeast Asia actually what happened in Southeast Asia was that the credit system suddenly froze up and people couldn't borrow anything so liquidity was denied companies went bankrupt all over the place and the banks and the financial institutions from Japan and the United States and Europe went in and bought up all the companies at dirt prices then they released the liquidity then the economy recovers then you sell them back at a huge amount and basically what the Chinese say was you know what the US and everybody's been doing is actually robbing the rest of the world of value by these monetary gains by playing these monetary things and they couldn't do that if you had a stable currency behind it which was the gold so being off the gold standard has been crucial to be able to rob the world of value and this is the Chinese view and then the Chinese kind of say look what's happened and it's not the country that does it it's not the US that does it it's the bankers who do it all the benefits go and I point about this all the benefits go to a certain class and that's how the rich have got incredibly richer by raiding the world of value through these financial manipulations and then the Chinese kind of say look after eastern south east Asia they did Brazil they did Argentina they did Russia then of course they did Greece and you know really everybody's been doing this and they said you know we're next they're going to raid us in China but we're not going to open our capital markets so there's this incredible pressure on China to open its capital markets and you know I'm stopped manipulating the currency and all this kind of stuff and the Chinese always say yeah we're trying to you know but you just can't see to manage to do it you see but you know what they're thinking is they're thinking is open our capital markets we'll get raided we're not going to do it because according to WTO the World Trade Organization China is still technically not a free market yeah exactly which is great when you get these people who are socialist and doesn't work look you need to have capitalism look what it's done with the global south look your organization guys WTO doesn't call it a free market economy no no right right right so so there but again you know what's been happening since the 1970s has been the betrayal of value by these monetary operations and the regard for value production has come less and less in that sense some of the things that are said by the cognitive capitalists are right that actually the value theory is in a lot of trouble because it's not capitalists are not actually paying attention to doing the right kinds of things to create a stable capitalism which creates of course the anticipation that we're in for a humongous kind of financial crash at some point or rather down the line whether it's located in China or somewhere else knows exactly 1971 this is the option of the gold standard prior to that for hundreds arguably thousands of years there's a metallic standard the most powerful currencies that changes in 71 it's a huge experiment where you still don't really know the consequences of it you talk about towards the end of the book about state finance nexus which has existed since 1700s late 1600s with the emotes of central banks what did that moment in 1971 mean for the state finance nexus and what comes after it are we in the end days of that moment now? No I think we're right in the middle of it still and in effect what happened after going off the gold standard you may remember there was in the United States and in Britain there was huge inflation interest rates had to go up to around 18% 20% I think in a couple of cases and the right blames trade unions for this this was because you know the temptation is to just print money and get out of a crisis by printing money and that's what in effect was happening and then of course you get inflation as a result so the control of inflation then suddenly became absolutely critical and that's when the banks and the central banks and the treasury had to get together and have a coherent kind of policy and a coherent policy that stretched to the international institutions primarily the International Monetary Fund but also the Bank of International Settlements and the World Bank places like that so you've got the emergence of an apparatus which is trying to make sure that global money supply did not go so far out of whack that you had the kind of inflation that would go by my Germany in the 1930s worldwide I mean what a catastrophe that would be and everybody realized that would be a catastrophe so then the treasury and the Federal Reserve stepped in to solve or try to solve the Mexican crisis with the politics of austerity they similarly stepped in to South Korea much later and did the same thing so this is the state finance nexus and it was this wonderful moment in the economic crisis of 2007-2008 after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt nobody seemed to know what to do the president sort of disappeared congress just didn't know what to do everything was going crazy and then all of a sudden out on television came two people one was a Ben Bowman key head of the Federal Reserve and the other was Hank Paulson secretary of the treasury and they came out with three page piece and said this is what we've got to do that was the state finance nexus now the rest of government mattered congress didn't matter, supreme court didn't matter whether this was constitutional or not nobody was going to ask any questions of that kind even though it plainly was unconstitutional some of the things they were demanding was a way that we can solve the situation solve it congress kind of didn't like it because it was only three pages so the congress actually rewrote it so it was 330 pages full of gobbledygook so they felt that they had been done but in effect at that time the people who ran the whole world economy and it was Hank Paulson and Ben Bowman key who you know with the instruments there and you saw they were in negotiation with the bank of Japan so there was a coordination between the world central banks and shortly after that there was a meeting of the G20 this was a state finance nexus kind of saying okay we now need to get and it's interesting it used to be the G7 or G6 and then it became G7 then it became G8 then this was the G20 and that G20 meeting actually came to a formal agreement that they were going to stabilize the global economy together in a certain kind of way the next G20 meeting it all broke down but at that moment what saved global capitalism was this core power which decided on the way out was to do a whole set of things internationally but also to do things domestically in terms of bailing out the failing banks speaking of the Italians 1970s Antonio Negri this stuff I think he wrote is around the time of the disruption of the gold standard and he says previously there was a mode of governance in regard to the economy and it was linked to a set of metaphysical presumptions really about the innate value of metal or silver or gold and then that's replaced by pure political management of exchange value by central banks and so while the neoliberals say look we've de-politicized finance, we've de-politicized central banks in fact they've never been more political no, they're the heart of this whole thing and it's fascinating to watch their evolution so final sort of part of the interview I want to talk about technology, history and change you've talked about before the historical process moves through according to Marx in a footnote of capital seven distinct moments they're distinct but they're also in dynamic tension and then they impact one another you write in this book that's what drives the historic process under capitalism I'm not sure if you would say prior to that as well, it makes sense to me as a framework for prior to capitalism as well and these seven moments include daily life mental conceptions, production processes nature I find it a really powerful way of understanding history and change what you say is technology is another one and what you say is that perhaps one of the common mistakes of our contemporary moment is that activists but also capitalists people like Silicon Valley CEOs privilege, that technological change is almost like a magic bullet in terms of solving intractable problems can you just briefly talk about these seven moments and your misgivings around technological determinism I mean clearly the dramatic transformations in technological mix and so on are revolutionary in their implications so I'm not going to downplay it and pretend it's not relevant but then some people kind of say well there are institutionalists around who say well the real reason why things are going is that different institutions get set up, institutions I mean the favorite ones are private property and law and market and therefore no amount of technology is going to actually give you development unless you have the right institutional framework and only when you have the right institutional framework can you get a freely developing capitalist kind of economy so you get the institutionalists who kind of say oh well forget all the other things just let's do the institutional side then there are those who kind of look at the relation to nature and can be geographically determinist, geographical in the sense of physical geographical conditions so that there are some people who even would argue that China is a privileged in some of its geographical situation right now relative to the privilege that did emerge in Western Europe because it was sort of fragmented kind of diverse the ecological niches and small kingdoms could sort of be in contact with each other so some people have a geographical determinist you read Jared Diamond or something like that the geographical determinist kind of line and then you will get the daily life kind of thing that or the mental conceptions that the idealists who kind of say well you know the fact that people suddenly started to think capitalistically in the sort of late feudal period and it came about sort of gradually but then there was a revolution in mental conceptions and sometimes the mental conceptions were about you know personal gain and I start the whole book you remember with this long quote from King John which is about a moment in English history when the commodity is suddenly becoming the arbiter of political loyalty as opposed to sort of loyalty to the house and kinship and tribe and all the rest of it so that this transformation of thinking so that I now monetize everything I do and judge it in terms of its monetary worth and even at that time there began to be this question of the value of a man was a man but you could also put it in terms of a woman too but the value of a man is given by their productivity and their capacities and things of this sort so you find all of these elements historically were there and to me it's important to think about a revolutionary process that approaches all of these elements in some way or other and one of the things I like about it is when you start a revolutionary moment anywhere you can do it technologically because there is a question what is a good socialist technology but then there is a question of what are the good socialist institutions then there is a question of what is a good socialist production apparatus and there is a question of what is a good socialist daily life so all of those questions are embedded and I think the failure of some communist experiments is to look at all of those elements and say what is a good element of all of those and how can they dynamically interact so that you don't end up with complete stasis in the system because the Stalinist view was change the productive forces change the technologies everything else will fall into place what plainly it didn't and my view is that unless you change the social relations fundamentally and the mental conceptions that attach to social relations at a certain point you're not going to get anywhere no matter what kind of technology you have which is why I'm very much against this post capitalist story right now which seems to me to be completely erroneous we'll get back to that in a second but this is also a mistake that's made by the left as you've just said so the Soviet Union privileged aspects of this and then you could say historically well eco-anarchists privileged relationship to nature anarchists historically I think privileged social relations you know if you don't if you're not mean to people it's a good thing communists shouldn't be mean to people anti-capitalist shouldn't be mean to people but it's clearly inadequate in changing the world so a request by the way is can you write a book about this for me because I that's a kind of that's a kind of thing I think a short book saying capitalism is revolutionary because it acts through the entirety of this constellation and therefore clearly any anti-capitalist project has to do likewise and I think that's a really good lesson for anybody that wants to change the world not that they have to focus on all seven but they can't ignore or dismiss any other elements I think okay I'll write a short book on it you'll get it three weeks time three weeks time finally there's no mention of socialism or communism in the book certainly not communism now clearly I know that for many people that has negative connotations but Marx is quite clear he puts communism in counterpoint to capitalism and all the things we've discussed production for exchange commodities and so on he says that this will no longer exist in communism and he in Capital Three I think it is he says that capitalism as with all historic society is a condition of necessity, state of necessity and that communism is a state of freedom which I read as essentially post scarcity we've been talking about the limits of capitalism you have in this book and your previous books for years now and I know there's a history of this on the left Marx says you know my job isn't to write the recipes to cook shops of the future but are we not a moment where that is quite important now I think the way I approach this is again go back to sort of daily life considerations and start to talk about processes of what I would call revolutionary reforms which is the idea that we can all storm some federal reserve bank and change the world you know I just don't think that's feasible and right now the capitalist state apparatus has such powers of domination and repression available to it militarization it seems to me that you know some sort of street revolt is not going to make it which is I think street demonstrations can be very helpful but a kind of stormy winter palace is not going to work so I think about revolutionary reforms and I think that you can start with a simple kind of process and say look over the last 40 years we've seen an increasing intensification of the commodification of education we have to reverse that we have to decommodify education for everyone and that's a tangible kind of thing and it's a feasible kind of thing actually when people could look at it we have to do the same with healthcare we have to try and do as much as we can on that for housing because housing is a right and right now it's you know so in other words we want to maximize the delivery of use values on education healthcare housing and it has to be outside of the commodity kind of rationing we should do the same with basic foodstuffs basic diet package foodstuffs should be free for everybody this would be great because actually the wastage in the food system right now is huge 40% the food in the united states goes to waste it just I was wondering I watched early morning people going through and taking out the rotten apples and throwing them away if you kind of said alright it was going to be a basic package if you like for everybody in the city you know so much in the way of this or that you know and then you can calculate and cut down on waste and all kinds of things and so you know and basic foodstuffs could be taken care of and then people can go and buy other things so in other words it seems to me there are some very simple kind of proposals which you can put to a social movement and say do you believe in these in these proposals if you do then let's let's push very hard to reorganize things in such a way that we can deliver these kinds of goods in a certain kind of way and we can deliver them freely to the mass of the population so we start to do things like that so I obviously agree with that in its entirety I self identify as a class war social democrat pending post scarcity communism so I'm not going to dismiss the importance of those those those as things that should be pursued politically but with one eye also to changes in technology automation the internet of things this is where I think post capitalism is useful is that Marx obviously talks about socialism he says socialism is still a condition of necessity communism isn't and I think what the post capitalist people are trying to do is perhaps integrate elements of what you're saying around the radical social democratic revolutionary reform stuff with an eye also to what may be such disruption in technology that it makes possible a different mode of production do you say that makes sense or only up to a certain point because at a certain point you've also got the class relation which needs to be dissolved and when I'm talking about turning all of these things into rights and you know I know perfectly well they're not going to be able to do that without actually confronting the centers of economic and political power in the world right now which go all the way from and the interesting thing is we know who these people are you know we know the Murdochs and even the supposedly good guys like the Gates and the Warren Buffetts you know I mean we know who they are so we know who the capitalist class is and they've got to be disempowered and completely disempowered and there has to be a much more democratic form of political organization which I think is crucial right now and I know that people are playing around with sort of assembly structures and things of that sort and there's these experiments in Rojava with the Kurds and so on and some of these I think are extremely interesting and we should be you know thinking about how to implement strong processes of democratization which I would hope would cope to some degree with the levels of alienation that are currently felt in society that is people having the capacity to participate in the decisions about their own futures that is a very important aspect also of what a revolutionary transformation about but that's an institutional that means switching to the institutional track and then you have to think about education which is one of the reasons I think people should read Marx because you know why wouldn't we read Marx these days it's crazy he has all these wonderful things to say and interesting things to say about what's going on in the world and yet we live in an educational world where hardly anybody talks about him and if they do they get him all wrong and deliberately so in many instances in some instances because you know I just don't know how to read it right that seems like a wonderful place to end you've been a jent as ever thank you cheers