Mass and the Politics of Scale

David Harvey (: 00:00

Welcome to the Anti-Capitalist Chronicles podcast, sponsored through Politics in Motion. And one of the issues that I want to take up is really a foundational issue for understanding where we are at right now because one of the things that I've been finding is that people take modes of analysis from some period in the past and present it as if somehow or is relevant in the present. At the same time, I find myself sort of defending the idea that just because Marx wrote in the middle of the 19th century that he is by definition out of date. So I want to, if you like, take both of those positions. That is an understanding that it's very important to recognize the times in which Marx was writing and the kinds of issues that were very prominent and which he had to take account of. And these issues are those which founded his theorizing of how capital actually works.

Chris Caruso (: 01:52

Hi, I am Chris Caruso, director of Politics in Motion. I'm a popular educator, community organizer and educational technologist. Politics in Motion is a new anti-capitalist media platform founded in May, 2023 by David Harvey, Miguel, Blas, Duran, and myself. We're working to create an intellectual strike force from the left. Our collective aim is to unsettle and combat the ideas of the billionaire class. We are assembling leading thinkers on our podcast to redefine strategies to build socialism in a transdisciplinary nons sectarian way. We're proud to offer our Patreon supporters exclusive monthly live question and answer sessions with our podcasters. Questions will be submitted in advance as well as live so that our supporters can dialogue directly with our team. Podcasts from Lara Avik and from Ecuador. Anna Rodriguez will be launching soon and we're thrilled to announce that we have new podcasters joining our team from Brazil, Raquel Rolnick from the uk, Andy Maryfield and from the US Willie Baptist, Sierra Taylor, and John Russell McCoy. Our aim is to have all our podcasts launched by the end of 2023. Please consider supporting us at patreon.com/politics motion. Thank you.

David Harvey (: 03:16

But things have changed and the question arises then as to whether we should really utilize Marx and if so, how should we utilize Marx? And I want to have a proposition here to say this, that when we begin with Marx, we begin with the foundational concepts at that time. But Marx was a dynamic thinker and he recognized that capital was always in the process of becoming. It was always in change. And that therefore as it changed, however it carried with it, all of those traces from its past so that you cannot simply dismiss everything that Marx had to say about capital back in the middle of the 19th century and say it is irrelevant to the present circumstance. No, it is the seed from which the present circumstance grew. And I think I want to talk a little bit about one of the major features which is radically different from Marx's time to ours.

(: 04:23

And at the same time try to make the point that a lot of the analysis that we have these days is very much colored by these new circumstances. But there is no accounting, if you like, for what those new circumstances are about. The simplest way to think about this is to really ask the question, why do we actually think of the United States as being the most powerful economy in the world and everything that happens in the United States. Why is everybody now saying, well, China is catching up or maybe even we'll surpass Exactly. In what sense surpass that China is a better society, a smaller society, a richer society? No, we actually have to look at is the size of China, the size of the United States. And so suddenly the big question is how big are things these days? And to in what sense is theory which was really geared to a world which was fairly kind of small scale and in many ways rather intimate compared to the current situation. In what ways is that changing radically by the kinds of scale at which capital is now operating works? In the former podcast, I talked a little bit about this and I think one of the things I pointed out that in 1950, the global economy in constant dollars was worth about $9 trillion.

(: 06:07

When we get to the period before Covid, the global economy was $90 trillion. That has been a tenfold increase over the last 70 odd years. Now tenfold increase over 70 years. Okay, it's manageable, but then you start to think of it, let's say what is an economy which doubles and if it is $9 trillion, well you've got to find new things to do with another $9 trillion. And that's a big sort of task, but it seems to be manageable. But when you say, okay, we economy economies $90 trillion and we're going to double it, we've got to find new things to do with $90 trillion. And that's in other words, the scale of which capital is now working is radically different from that which existed in Marxist time. And that notion of bigness and scale and all the rest of it takes up I think more and more of our time, even though most people tend to ignore it.

(: 07:26

So that we will take something like the climate change crisis and all the rest of it and say, well, we have a particular problem right now and somehow or other we can deal with that problem by internalizing it within the growth strategies of a capitalist economy by having green capitalism and even when it's not greenwashing, but it could be real or we change things radically. And by changing things radically, we presume that we have solved the problem. I think for example, right now it's a very interesting kind of moment. We have a strike going on of the United Auto Workers and so this is a sort of conventional class struggle issue and everybody feels comfortable with that. But one of the issues that exists in that strike is the whole conversion to electric vehicles as opposed to the internal combustion engine. And somehow or other this is thought that this is going to be the solution or one of the major solutions to the climate problem.

(: 08:41

Well, I think it actually tends to look like this. The global economy has been accelerating, moving faster, growing faster, and it's headed towards in some ways I think a calamitous collision with the realities of what exists on planet earth to be able to be exploited. And I think, well in a way, what if you've asked me to sort of talk a little bit about the climate crisis and the electrification of the automobile industry then and electronic electric vehicles and so on, if you ask me to talk about that, then what I'm going to say is, well, it seems to me that that whole auto mobilization process, which has gone on worldwide and has accelerated over time to the point where now we have an enormous number of vehicles in the United States and somehow or other what we've done is we've said, well, this is a problem for the environment in terms of air quality and also in terms of global warming and so on.

(: 09:57

So we switch and it's almost like an express train racing down one track and towards calamity. And somebody says, well, we can get out of this by building another track if you like, which everything can go on. And that's going to take a lot of reinvestment, a fantastic amount of absorption of surplus capital and labor into the retooling of the automobile industry to produce these new kinds of vehicles and render the old ones obsolescent. And so in the end, we'll have a huge, huge problem of junk disposal of old automobiles in order to wag bay for the electric ones. And this system which was powering towards a calamitous collision with the realities of the world is supposedly solved by shifting to this other track. My answer to that is it's not at all, in fact the whole question of what is going to happen to the automobile industry and the automobile auto mobilization of the world, which has been going on now for almost a hundred years.

(: 11:13

This is the problem that needs to be looked at and it is now occurring at a scale which is radically different from what it was say 50 years ago. So in the same way that we had this extreme expansion and an increase in size of what the capitalist economy is about, some of that size is reflected in the fact that the number of Tmobile being produced is increasing, is now their electronic as opposed to gas powered. And I don't think that really makes any difference. We are still hurtling towards a really big problem in terms of being able to sustain a tripling of the automobile output over the say the next 10, 15 years. We still got that problem. Now of course it will no longer be drawing upon fossil fuels, but then you will suddenly turn around and you'll see vast mountains torn apart in Latin America looking for lithium and the whole kind of problem of rare earth metals.

(: 12:28

So which are required, we have a completely different world of organization of the buying and selling and so on of automobiles where at some point or rather we will find that we have to dispose of all of those old automobiles, which were no longer, if somebody says, okay, only electronic vehicles, electrical vehicles from now on, you could see the situation. So one of the things that I would want to emphasize is that we need to think very carefully about the scale at which capital is operating. And as it changes scale and as it moves into something which is much, much larger, we then get this problem of well over the next 50 years we're going to have to find new consumption and production outlets for the amount of value or the amount of money which is circulating as capital, which right now is just about $90 trillion, but we'll be talking about $180 trillion.

(: 13:42

So this is really one of the ways in which we then say, well, the growth incentive and the growth machine as it were, has to be dismantled and it has to be dismantled in a way that somehow or other allows us to meet the current needs. But we have organized society so that we automatically need an automobile. I suddenly find myself needing an automobile. I have to have one, people have to have one to get around. It's a major, major thing. So what to do about the automobile over the next 30 or 40 years seems to me to be a crucial kind of question that needs to be thoroughly addressed. The way it's being addressed right now is to say, well actually the automobile industry is absorbing a vast amount of surplus capital. It'll absorb a certain amount of labor by switching from conventional automobile production to electrical vehicle production.

(: 14:50

And somehow or other, this is seen as also satisfying the problem of the environmental difficulties that have come with climate change and all the rest of it. I don't think it's going to do it at all. In fact, I think it's going to make matters much worse. So that here we have a situation whereby just thinking through the implications of a doubling of the economy over the next, I dunno, 10 years or something of that kind, thinking through the implications of that. And that is what capital requires, says, well, let's say, let's look at that choice. Do we want to say, okay, let's end capitalism and then we won't have to increase by double over the output over the next 10 years? Or do we say, okay, well we are going to go for a doubling output over the next 10 years. And by the way, one of the ways we can do that is to somehow render our current fleet of automobiles entirely redundant.

(: 15:52

And we declare that everybody has to have an electrical vehicle by, I dunno, 2035 or something like that. So you see what I'm saying? But we now have to understand that this is the kind of choice we are making without discussion. That is, we don't discuss it as if to say, should we do this or should we do that? What we do is to say, oh, we're going to do that. And that seems to solve the problem, but it doesn't solve the problem. And if we start to look around at all of the solutions that are being proposed, particularly to the environmental question, but the same thing applies I think to social equality that we kind of say, look, social equality has got out of hand, it's gone completely wacko. And we have now the billionaire class and the autocracy there corrupting the world with their money and with their desires.

(: 16:57

And we find now that the Supreme Court in the United States, it's been essentially a vehicle for the Koch brothers and the other billionaires to actually get completely new legal determinations as to what can or cannot be done by government interventions. So we have all of these issues which we are looking at, and we're not really sitting it down saying, what's the real issue here? I think the real issue, and go back to the central thing, the real issue is this whole kind of question of size and how huge, how Marx used to use this word, monstrous. So to him what was going on on the stock exchanges in the mid 19th century was a monstrous utilization of monstrous amounts of money to do monstrous things. And so we use that kind of language. Well, if he could use that back then we could use it now.

(: 17:59

But now it's not monstrous in the same way at all. It's actually totally monstrous and actually is likely to result in making the earth are rather uninhabitable for most of the world's population who are already seeing some kind of consequences of that with these migratory streams coming from all over the world, different parts of the world actually being depopulated because they cannot sustain their populations anymore. So what we're moving into is a situation where the foundational problem, which is the scale and the scale is constantly increasing because capital has always been about accumulation, accumulation for accumulation sake, production for production sake. And it's always been about increasing scale because of the profit requirement that what motivates everything is profit. And profit means you have something more at the end of the day than you had at the beginning of the day. And then who has it and what happens to it and so on is then up for grabs.

(: 19:13

But there is therefore, if you like, the laws of motion of capital, which marks identified way back in the middle of the 19th century continue to apply. But the laws are about the laws of accumulation and the laws of production. And as such, it's about increasing the scale of the problem that we have to deal with. And because we are increasing the scale of the problem we have to deal with, we have to actually start to think about politics organizing at a rather different scale. What goes on right now is that politics is fine at the very local level, it's not so fine. Whereas you go up the chain, you go to the metropolitan level, you go to the national level, you go to the global level. But right now what we have to do is to start to think about a political program which is actually going to stop this process of continuously doubling the economy's size every 10, 15, maybe whatever years it is.

(: 20:21

We have to slow that down, stop it. And that means, of course, at a certain point, doing away with the profit motive as the guiding force for economic activity and all of those institutions which are set up to actually measure and organize the profit production, all of those have to be radically reconfigured so that we actually produce less and less or fine modes of production, which do not involve mass consumption and mass production in the way that is currently the case. So this is one of the foundational things I think, and I've long been concerned with the fact that a 10% rate of return on a hundred dollars is one thing, a 2% rate of return on millions and trillions of dollars is another thing. So what we have to do is to come back to that basic kind of mathematical simple equation and say we cannot continue in the mode we are currently going.

(: 21:48

That then faces a real serious problem. Because there are many areas of the world which are desperate new forms of development or desperate for increase of productivity and increases of product, many parts of the world, which if they are not those desires are not met, is likely to result in this increase in migratory movements which are seriously, seriously changing the demographic structures that the world is facing these days. So this is, if you like a major question always to be kept in mind, which doesn't mean that we can somehow other chop down stop production and stop this conversion into electric vehicles and so on, but we have to rethink what the possible consequences are. And we're not really thinking through the future consequences of current actions because in many ways what we're doing is condemning the future by our present decisions. And our present decisions are not, it seems to me being shaped by actually focusing on one of the biggest issues of all time, which is how big can the capitalist economy get and what are going to be the consequences of that bigness? And as it gets more closer and closer to some edge beyond which we cannot go, what are we going to do? And maybe we should actually take that into account right now and start to think that problem through very seriously as a political question, which needs to be on the front of the agenda rather than basically forgotten about or taken as self-evident. So that's if you like the issue that I would like to really concentrate on right now, and it's the one that keeps me most awake at night.