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good evening. hi. my name's john peterson. i'm the curator ofthe loeb fellowship. this is a lecture thatfeatures a senior loeb scholar. for the last severalyears-- i don't even actually know theyear it started, because i wasn't here-- we'vebeen inviting one or two senior loeb scholars each year tospend an extended period of time

with us, something beyonda lecture, something less than a year as atypical loeb fellow. this was the brainchildof our dean, mohsen, who had this idea to bringsomeone here of note, someone that the student bodyand faculty could gain more access to thannormally a lecturer might bring. i want to thank all the folksthat make this sort of thing happen.

sally young, the programcoordinator, shantel and the events staff whoare supporting this event but also supportingother activities throughout the week withthis year's senior loeb scholar, david harvey. there's a seminar tomorrow. you can see that on the eventspage on the gsd website. but i'm here onlyto introduce this as a part of the gsdexperience, this program.

and dianne fainsteinis going to-- susan i'm sorry? oh, susan. i was thinking about gettingsusan's last name correct. and i missed susan's--uh, diane's first name-- susan's first name. who's sitting very closeto diane davis, of course. so susan fainstein is ascholar in her own right--

is going to be heretoday and tomorrow as part of the seminar. and she's goingto be introducing our senior loeb scholarthis year, david harvey. thank you, susan. [applause] well, that's the closest i'vegotten to being a senator. at any rate, it givesme great pleasure to welcome davidharvey back again

to the gsd, and great pleasurefor me to be here tonight too. as some of you know, i taughthere for a number of years. at any rate, david is thedistinguished professor of anthropology and geography atthe city university of new york graduate center. and he's also taughtat johns hopkins and been the mackinderchair at oxford university. beginning in 1973,with the publication of social justiceand the city, i

think it's fair to say thatdavid harvey revolutionized the discipline of geographyand, more broadly, the disciplines involvedin urban studies. he did this by bringinga marxist analysis to the study of the city, butalso injected into marxism, which really had lacked a theoryof space and social space, so that he really broughta spatial understanding to the associateddisciplines of urban studies. his long list ofpublications-- and i

think they're enumerated in theannouncement for this lecture. i'm not going togo through them. but it includes, amongmany others, books on environmental justice,on neoliberalism, on the transformation ofparis, on the development of urban consciousness,and on marx's capital. in linking the questionof social justice to urban development,professor harvey has broadly influenced themultiple disciplines concerned

with the physical, social, andeconomic development of cities. his concern with lefebvre's"right to the city" runs through all his work. and it's of crucial importanceto the design professions that are representedhere at the gsd. so please join me inwelcoming david harvey. ok, so thanks for inviting me. and it's a sort of a pleasureto be here in harvard. it's not often i getinvited to harvard.

and actually, i'm quiteproud of that fact. but-- [laughter] --in this instance,i'll forgive you. i want to start witha simple fact, which astonished me andcontinues to astonish me. between 1900 and 1999,the united states consumed 4,500 milliontons of cement. that's in one century.

between 2011 and 2013, chinaconsumed 6,500 million tons of cement. that is, in threeyears, the chinese consumed 50% more cementthan the united states had consumed in the wholeof the preceding century. now that is a scale of magnitudeof spreading cement around which is quite unprecedented. and you can just imaginewhat the environmental, political, and socialconsequences might be.

so the question i really wantto ask is, why did that happen? in so doing, i want tomake a mild complaint about how the socialsciences work these days. when i first got intothe social sciences, we were very much trained totry to answer the question, why? and we spent a lot of time on itand made some pretty flamboyant suggestions as to why. and sometimes totallyunsubstantiated, but at least asking why it was what we did.

from the 1970s onwards,there's been a gradual erosion. less and less do peopleask the question, why? they ask the question, how? and the question "how?" hashelped a great deal, i think, in unraveling a lot of theintricacies of what goes on so that you no longer talk aboutthe compelling force of class struggle or somethinggreat like that. you talk about how it is thatthe developers get together with the lawyers, gettogether with the construction

companies, andthey create a mess. and then this happens,and then that happens. but i think we've had abit too much concentration on the question, how? because whenever i asksomebody who's been very deeply involved in a "how?" story,well, why did it happen? the answer always comes back. it's the same. it's complicated.

and i say, well, yeah,i know it's complicated. but you've got to tell me why. no, you can't because you've gotto deal with the complications. and i kind of go-- iget a bit impatient. so i want to askwhy that happened, all of that cementbeing spread around. well, of course, if it wascement being spread around, it's obviously beingused in construction. it's obviouslyabout the creation

of built environmentsand urbanization and infrastructuresand all the rest of it. and there has to be an immenseamount of that going on. but of course, it'snot only cement that's involved in construction. so if you turn tothe steel industry, you suddenly see anenormous expansion of steel production in chinaand china consuming half of the world's steel output.

you also need allsorts of other things. you need copper. you need minerals of all sorts. so china's been consumingabout 60% or 70% of the world's copper supply. so you go across the board. and you see a hugeamount of raw materials. and suddenly, of course,raw material prices are relatively high.

and raw material mining activityis erupting all over the world. and in strange places, allof a sudden, whole mountains are being shifted. and all sorts of consequencesof that sort are occurring. so the questionis then, well, why was china involved in sucha huge, huge expansion of its urbanizationinfrastructural investment? and what do we wantto say about it? now in this, i have togo back a little bit,

in the first instance, to2007, 2008, when there was, as you're aware, acrisis which originated, interestingly, in thiscountry and, therefore, was defined as a global crisis. other crises could occur insoutheast asia in 1997, '98. they were regional crises. but you know, the unitedstates has a world series. so it has to havea world crisis. and actually, itwas quite localized.

it originated particularlyin southwest united states and the south of united states. and it was, of course, inhousing markets and property markets that it waslargely focused. now, again, i'm going to goback to that in a minute. but the consequenceof this crisis was, of course, that therewas a foreclosure crisis. there was widespreadunemployment in this country. and people who've justbeen foreclosed upon

or are about tobe foreclosed upon and people who areunemployed don't really go out and buy things. and so the consumer marketin the united states basically collapsed. and of course, the primarysupplier to that consumer market was china. and so china suddenlyfound its export industries diminishing rapidly in avery short period of time,

disappearing down by about 20%. and it's verydifficult, of course, to figure out with thechinese statistics what's real and what's not. but by some accounts,something like 30 million jobs were lost in china. this is a huge job loss-- inlate 2008, that kind of period. and one thing we do knowabout the chinese government is that it is very, verynervous about potential unrest.

and with 30 millionunemployed people, this is a rather roughsituation to be in. now by the end of2009, there was a report that cameout from the imf and the ilo which talkedabout what the net job loss had been in the crisis. and the united stateshad the largest net job loss during that period. china, which i would've expectedto have had a huge net job

loss given that itlost 30 million, actually only had a net jobloss of about 3 million. and what this suggests is thatchina somehow or other managed to absorb 27 millionpeople in the labor market in the space of about 1 year. again, a bit like thecement statistics, this is an astoundingperformance. well, here you do comeback to the question of, how did they do that?

and how they did it was thecentral government basically told everybody to getout and lend and create as many projects asyou possibly could. so everything from regionalto local to national endeavors were put to work. the banks were told to lend. and unlike the unitedstates, when they gave money to the banks tolend, the assumption was that the bankswere going to do it.

but there's no power to do it. but the chinesebanking system is not arranged on such a principle. if you tell the bankersto lend, they lend. and they did. so china developed thishuge urbanization program and infrastructuredevelopment program, building whole new cities,integrating the space economy of the nation, connectingsouthern and northern markets

in a much strongerway, developing the interior of china so thatthe coast and the interior were much more matched together. and when i waslooking at this, i was reminded very much ofwhat the united states had done after world war ii. which is, faced with theproblem of coming out of the depression and a hugeincrease in productive capacity during world war ii,the united states

was faced with a problem. how do we not goback into depression? how do we actually absorb allof that productive capacity in ways which aregoing to be profitable? and the generalanswer was, well, we've got to developthe us economy. and there's a lot of talkabout us imperialism. and that played a role. and there's a lot oftalk about the cold war.

and that certainlyplayed a role. but the big thing they didwas to suburbanize, to create huge, kind of, investments. the interstate highwaysystem to pull together the west coast and the southand to integrate the us economy. and of course, the 1950s and1960s were, in many respects, the golden years ofcapital accumulation. very high rates of growth,very satisfactory situation. and so the chinese,effectively, did the same

as the us had doneafter world war ii, but did it much fasterand at a much huger rate. and i was struck, when i wasthinking about all of this, that i'd seen this kind ofgame of using urbanization to solve economic andpolitical problems. i'd seen it before. and of course, my favoritecase is second empire paris and haussmann. and how haussmann was brought,in the wake of 1848 revolution

and the massive unemploymentof capital and labor, to rebuild the city of paris. and this is one of the waysin which all that labor and capital was absorbed. so by 1855, everybody'sback in full employment. napoleon, who's declaredhimself emperor, is secure because the economyis going well and everything. so they've solved the problem. but you solve the problem,of course, at a certain cost.

and in both the paris caseand the united states case after world warii, and of course in the recent chinesecase, the cost is that you goheavily into debt. so one of the things that thechinese did was to debt finance all of this. but unlike greeceand other places, they didn't debtfinance using dollars. they didn't borrowfrom the united states.

they had enough surplusfrom the united states. so they borrowed intheir own currency. and the great advantageof that is you can always inflate awayand deal with the problems of-- but actually, chinamoved from a fairly low debt to gdp ratio. it doubled itsratio of debt to gdp in about five years in thishuge, huge urbanization and infrastructural investment.

now you can thenstart to look at this and then say, well, thisis the chinese answer to what might have been a veryserious depression in 2007, 2008. but it wasn't onlythe chinese answer, because several otherplaces saw what the game was and did the same sort of thing. turkey, for example, wentthrough a crisis in 2001, but pretty soon got outof it through a kind

of huge expansionin its urbanization and had the second highestgrowth rate, after china, during this post-2008 period. and anybody who was supplyingchina with those raw materials, like copper, ironore, and the like, came out of thething pretty well. so most of latinamerica, which was kind of full of rawmaterials, including soybeans and all the rest of it-- solatin america turned itself

into one vast soybeanplantation, basically, for the china trade. latin america switchedits kind of allegiances in terms of global capital flowsto the pacific and to asia. and the depression, whichaffected very much the united states and elsewhere,didn't really affect latin america tothe same degree elsewhere. it was relatively mild. though, of course, what'sinteresting is, in the case

of brazil, they did the samething as the chinese had done. lula, when the crisishit, said, we're going to build a million houses,low-income houses for the poor. and so that program,mi casa mi vida, became part of thebrazilian answer to what was a rather shallowdepression in 2000, 2008. but unfortunately,as often happens in these cases, whatthe brazilians did was basically give the moneyto the construction companies.

and they didn't ask themto actually urbanize in any sensible kind of way. so construction companiesjust built shoddy housing in bad environments withoutany kind of infrastructures. they didn't build a city. they didn't build urbanization. they just built housesand dumped them down wherever they could finda place to put them. and of course, that didabsorb capital and labor.

but it didn't actually createa decent living environment for anybody very much. so you then lookat the world, which is kind of very interesting. there is this vastexpansion going on in china, whichhas ramifications all around the world. and in the unitedstates and europe, partly for ideological reasons,we find this commitment

to austerity, andwe've got to get out of the debt, and allthose kinds of things. so you find, if you like,a neoliberal orthodoxy, which has kind of upped the anteduring this depression, phase which is contrastingwith what really was a sort of a keynesianstyle expansion of china. so the world is dividedinto two camps, sort of. but as happened tohaussmann in 1867 and as happened to the grandsuburbanization spree

at the end of the1960s into the 1970s, all good things come to an end. and so there was,in china, and has been in china notonly signs of crashes over the last few years,but increasing signs of, this is now no longer possible. it's no longer possible tocontinue this, with the result that all of a sudden--two or three years ago, if you were in brazil,everybody was running around

like they had plenty of money. and they could do whatthe hell they liked. and then this time yougo, and it's total chaos because the money has dried up. i spent some time in ecuador. and ecuador was doing great. they were building highways. they were buildingall kinds of things. i couldn't figure out how itwas that their great new idea

that you were going tobuild in terms of buen vivir is actually satisfiedby building highways and suburban tract housing. but nevertheless, that'swhat they were doing. but all of that's come toan end in latin america, all over the place. and so latinamerica now is a bit of a disaster zoneeconomically and politically. so you see these aspects of howthe crisis is moving around.

now one of the theses that i'vebeen looking at theoretically is the theoreticalquestion, why do crises move around in the way they do? they move around geographically. and they move aroundsectorially so that you have ahousing crisis, which creates a financialcrisis, which is solved by sovereign debt activities. and you get asovereign debt crisis.

and then, all of a sudden,the sovereign debt crisis is in greece. and you say, well,how did it get there? and next thing you know,dubai world has gone up. gulf states have gone crazy. so all sorts of things-- andit was a very peculiar kind of story about how the crisistendencies get moved around. but you can see also, as theyget moved around, some of them get reinterpreted as havingdifferent causalities.

and so the greek crisisoccurred because-- the fight with the germans occurredbecause the greeks are lazy. it didn't occur because of anyof all this other stuff going on. and you then get thesevery simplistic notions. the crisis in this countryis due to immigrants. you've heard that one, i guess. so we have to actuallydeal then with the way in which the crisis unfolded.

and in order to do that, wehave to look at the trajectory. the main thesis that i'mworking on these days is not only how crisesget moved around, but how crises areactually embedded in the very structures of whatcapital accumulation are about. and one of the moreinteresting insights i would have, and sort of don'thave time to go into here, is i've been looking atmarx's theory of value, and value creationand value production.

and going back throughmarx, as i usually do, for about the 19th time--or maybe it's the 99th time. i can't remember. and it turns out that marx isinterested not only in value, but he's also interestedin anti-value. and in fact, there'sas much in marx about anti-value asthere is about value. and i was suddenly struckby this great metaphor. the physicists can onlyexplain the universe

by having matterand anti-matter. actually, you can onlyexplain all this dynamic that's going on in termsof value creation and value destruction andanti-value activity. and actually, capital thriveson the anti-value as much as it thrives-- and it has toproduce the anti-value in order to get the value. and this is kind ofa fascinating aspect of marx's theory which mostpeople have not really looked

at, i think, closely enough. so one of my future projectsis to put that all together. but this notion, however,of crisis formation has-- moving around. of course, we seethat the crisis that occurred in 2007, 2008 hadits roots, in many respects, in the way thatthe crisis of 2001 was resolved, that thestock market crashed, the kind of new economy, as itwas called, the electronics.

the dotcom economy crashed. and money flowed outof the stock markets. nobody knew whereto put their money. and greenspan droppedthe interest rates. and so everything started toflow into property markets. so there you're lookingat capital flows. now this is a storythen that says, the reason thatthis is occurring is because there is, deep withincapitalism, this struggle going

on between valuecreation and value destruction and anti-value. and that the anti-valueis actually fundamental to the value, that youcannot do without one. and one form ofanti-value-- and you'll be surprised when you hear mesay this-- is credit and debt. because what debtdoes is to say, you have to now createvalue to this amount. and if you can't create it tothis amount, then you go bust.

so credit and debt is one ofthe ways in which you actually foreclose upon futurevalue production. and this is terriblyimportant to capital. because if we had anopen situation where we could actuallydo what we wanted, we probably wouldn't do allof those things that they do. what we would do is dosomething completely different. but actually, it'sall foreclosed. we've got to do this now.

we have actuallyimprisoned ourselves into certain structuresof value production because we havecommitted ourselves by virtue of the nature ofthe debts we've assumed. this is true of homeowners. and this was wellunderstood back in the 1930s whenall of those reforms came in in the mortgage market,which was that debt encumbered homeowners don't go on strike.

so, ok, we'll debtencumber as many homeowners as we possibly canafter world war ii. and then theydon't go on strike. furthermore, we'll put themin the suburban country, out there whererevolution is hardly going to be on the agenda. and we give them a car. and we give them a nicehome and a swimming pool and that kind of thing.

and they're goingto be completely-- and we suddenly find that,actually, the formation of political subjectivities byenvironmental reconfigurations and urbanization plays avery, very important role in social stability. and actually, peoplehave code words for this. for instance, the worldbank keeps on going on, and the imf keeps on goingon about how home ownership creates social stability.

no, it doesn't. it doesn't. what about all the foreclosures? i mean, they wrote that in themiddle of all the foreclosure crisis. and you're saying, what? and now, of course, you've gotan interesting political thing where that politicalcontrol has broken down. and suddenly, a lot ofthose foreclosed homeowners

and those people whofeel under threat are doing all kindsof crazy things politically, both onthe left and the right. and everybody is surprised. and you kind of go, whywould you be surprised? i mean, this is thoroughly,thoroughly predictable, that actually, you create asituation where, actually-- and this is kind of-- i livedin baltimore for many years. and so when baltimore sort ofwent up in its customary riots,

i was reminded of the fact iarrived in baltimore in 1968, just after the assassinationof martin luther king. and all of the riots that wenton, and baltimore burned down. and then, of course, hereit is all this time later. and we get a sort ofrepeat performance. but when you look atthe foreclosure data, you know that, actually, a lotof the stability in baltimore that had been created--particularly most african american populationshad been destroyed, totally

destroyed. and here we have now asituation of social instability. and you wonder how,systemically, it's going to be responded toand in what dimensions it's going to be responded to. now this then raises a kindof interesting question. what is it that thechinese are going to do, given their currentdifficulties? well, i have another theorythat i'm very fond of.

and it's called thespatial fix, which says, when there are surplusesof capital and labor somewhere or other, then one ofthe things that happens is people start to take it. and they start to spreadit around elsewhere. this is what realeconomic imperialism was about from themid-19th century onwards. surplus capital andlabor from britain came to the united states,or went to australia, places

like that. and imperial activitiescan take two forms. and the british empire, ithink, was an interesting one, to the degree thatbritain tried to keep india as a captive market. it didn't actually helpresolve the problems of overaccumulation ofcapital and surplus labor in britain because the demandfrom india was not very strong. the indians were being forcedto produce all kinds of things,

including opiumto sell to china, which kind of is an interestingthing about capital. it's pretty neutral aboutthose sorts of things. so you wonder what's goingto happen in the drug trade in the near future. but on the otherhand, britain didn't control the united states. and the surpluscapital from britain and labor from britaincoming to the united states

could create analternative center of capitalist development,which actually created a huge amount of demand,which actually absorbed much more of british goods. and it was much moreof a better solution to britain'soveraccumulation problems. the only problem was,at some point or other, the united states becamestronger than britain. and so it too hadsurplus capital--

wondering what to do with it. now the chinese have gota lot of surplus capital. and this is what makesme particularly fearful. because the capital couldbe in monetary form, or it can be in physicalproduction form. and one of the surplusesof capital they have is huge surplus capacityin making cement and steel. so how are they goingto deal with it? well, they're trying toactually bring down--

deal with the overproductioncapacity a little bit within china itself. but at the same time,they're looking outwards to say, where can we actuallyspread this cement around? and they've come up witha number of answers. one of them is internal. for instance, i don'tknow how credible this is. but the financial times hasreported on several occasions that the chineseare now proposing

to create one city of somethinglike 130 million people. there is one citywhich is basically going to contain the wholepopulation of britain and france. it's going to becentered on beijing. it's going to be all high-speedstuff and everything, which will take up a lot ofsteel and concrete, right? huge amounts ofsteel and concrete. so that's one way of dealingwith the problem-- create

a city of 130 million people. do you want to live in acity of 130 million people? i don't know about that. but that's not enough. so one of the things youfind is that, of course, china is spreadingout and wanting to put cement everywhere. it wants to putit in east africa. it's building railroads andbuilding highways and building

things in east africa. and of course, it's allchinese cement and steel which is being usedin all of that, and a lot of chinese labor, eventhough there's plenty of labor there. they're doing thesame in latin america. there is thiswhole kind of thing about transcontinental raillines running from pacific to atlantic so that youcan get from a port in peru

to sao paolo in one and a halfdays or something of that kind. shooting it over the top of theandes and down the other side. and there are severalproposals of this kind that were laid out some time ago. but nobody took them thatseriously until the chinese came along and said,hey, we got enough steel and-- so they're doing that. there's the other reportcoming about about how they're going to rebuildthe silk road so that you

can get from shanghai toistanbul on a high-speed rail network that runsthrough central asia. and actually, already,those central asian cities are building like crazy. so suddenly, this is becominga big urbanization spot. this is a program,which is simply about-- would not occur were it not forthe fact that the chinese have all of this surplus capacityin cement and steel production. and of course, thisis one of the ways

in which they canactually stabilize what might be a rough landingin the chinese economy through a crisis inchina, as opposed to a gradual tailingoff and managing to deal with the surpluscapital accumulation by using this sort oftechnique of the spatial fix. but this is actuallydoing something that i think is reallyvery interesting. and one of the things thati have commented on-- so

forgive me if i restateit-- is that if you look at the scale of haussmann'sproject in paris, it was about the city. there was some stuffthat went on elsewhere. they were building railroadsthroughout france as well. if you look at whatwent on in this country after world war ii, it was asort of metropolitan level. moses was the kind of figure. you move fromhaussmann to moses.

and it's a transformation ofscale at which the urbanization process is understood. but now you look at it,and you say, this figure of how much cementgot consumed is indicative of anotherchange of scale. and it is of an enormitythat i find deeply troubling. and we should askthe question, why? why is this happening? why does it seem inevitable?

why is it that we'renot sitting and saying, no, no, we don't want that? well, it has a lot to dowith the nature of what capital accumulation is about. capital accumulation is,of course, about expansion. it's about growth. it's always about growth. it has to be about growth. and for a verysimple reason, which

is a capitalist startsthe beginning of the day with a certain amount ofmoney, goes into the market, buys labor power andmeans of production, creates a commodity,and sells it at the end of the day formore than at the beginning of the day. that is, value has to increase. and in a healthycapitalist economy, all capitalists are actuallyincreasing their value

at the end of theday, which means there has to be a lot moreat the end of the day. so when you look at the historyof capital accumulation, what do you see? you see that it has beenincreasing at a compound rate. now compound growth ratesproduce exponential curves. and exponentialcurves go like that. and there's always inflectionpoints in exponential curves. they sort of seem todawdle along pretty mildly

for a little bit. and then they go up. and then they go, voom. it's like the famousstory of the guy who invented chess and asked theking to give him a reward. he put one grain ofrice on the first square and doubled it for every square. and by the time you getto about the 46th square, all the rice in theworld is used up.

and how you get to the64th square, nobody knows. this is the natureof compound growth. and there are somewonderful stories about it. there was a fascinationwith compound growth, in a positive sense,in the 17th century. and marx has a greattime talking about some of these people. and actually, charlesdickens got into it in a very interesting way.

if you're familiar withthe novel bleak house-- throughout bleak house,there is this lawsuit, jarndyce versus jarndyce,which has been going on for ages and ages and ages. actually, it was a real lawsuitwhich originated in 1785 when somebody had 600,000 poundsand said it should be invested at a compound rate of 7%. and that it should notbe touched for 100 years. the trouble was that when peoplestarted to actually reckon

what that becameworth in 100 years, they found it was actuallyabout three times the size of the british economy. and so they actually introduceda law that said things like this couldn't go on. you cannot make a bequestthat lasts more than 30 years. now all of the people whowere the sons and daughters of the original person who madethis decision contested it. and so it was contestedin the courts.

and it was decidedin 1857, which is when dickens waswriting bleak house. and at that time, it wasthe big joke of the town. because as you rememberin bleak house-- and this is actually what happened. when they actuallydecided on the case, there was no money left. it had all gone in legal fees. and so this is-- well,don't get me on lawyers.

but anyway. so compound growth then isbuilt into the capitalist accumulation process. and i bet all of you, insofar asyou're involved in urbanization projects, are actuallyinvolved in the question of how to manage growth andhow best to make it grow. you want growth. why do you want growth? growth is the wrongthing right now.

we're on that inflection point. and if we actually double ortriple the amount of cement we have to pourin 30 years time, which is implicit in whatcompounding growth is about, your kids will be upto here in cement. now this is not afeasible project. right now, theproblems of environment and all the rest ofit are serious enough to say we have to do somethingabout this absolutely

senseless commitment to growth. and there's an irony here. we've actually, in europeand the united states, for all the wrong reasons,seen very low growth. but actually, that'senvironmentally friendly. the places that have notseen slow growth-- other ones which have been wreckingtheir environments and, furthermore,wrecking the environments of all kinds of other places.

ecuador, for example,where i spend some time-- or have beenspending some time-- is now 50% or more committedto the china trade. its foreign investmentis heavily chinese. and what are the chinese doing? they're building things. they're building a hugehydroelectric project with chinese cement and chinesesteel and chinese labor. and yeah, it's going toprovide about 60% or 70%

of the electricitydemand in ecuador, and all the rest of it. but this is ahuge, huge project. and of course, theyalso want to support putting a highway overthe andes and all of that. so these projects arecoming about because of the necessity of growth. now i am simply goingto say, at this point, that we've got to a point wherewe have to argue that there is

a need to thinkabout, not necessarily a zero-growth society,but a way in which growth can be actually tempered down. because the compoundingrate of growth, according to thosepeople who've tried to measure this stuff--since about 1780 onwards, the actual figure thatsomebody like madison comes up with after assemblingas much data as he can about it is something like a2.25% compound growth.

that's what history of capitalaccumulation points to. and 2.25% compound growth in1780 wasn't really a problem. by the time you get to 1900,it's not really a problem. i mean, much of theworld still has not been incorporated withincapital accumulation. but look what'shappened since 1970. you've incorporated-- chinahas come into the system. the soviet empire has collapsed. and so that is now partof the whole thing.

and we're talking about a 3%compound growth on all of that. and actually, whenyou look, what you see is a very interestingpattern in all of these countries of usingurbanization as part of what that growth process is about. i've mentioned what thechinese plan is for beijing. the turks have a similarplan for istanbul. they want to create acity of 45 million people. and to that end, they'recolonizing the whole

of the north of the bosphorus. they're putting a new bridgeover the northern end. they want to build anairport up there and all this kind of stuff. this is a hugeurbanization project. the problem for turkey isthat it's got to borrow money. and it's got to borroweither euros or dollars. and that's not so easy to do. the chinese don't havethat restraint for reasons

i've already kind of mentioned. so the boom in turkeyhas come a bit unstuck because it's recognizedthat the debt of the country is not necessarily as payable. and so people start to worryabout-- international investors start to worry aboutthat sort of thing. so with this future,it seems to me that there are a numberof things we should start seriously to think about.

we have to thinkabout how to organize an economy in such a way thatit's not dedicated solely to growth. now the ecuadoriansand others have this notion of buildingit around something called buen vivir. it turned out to be kind ofjust a piece of rhetoric. and it really isn't serious,but it could be serious. and we need, i think, toreally look very closely

at how we can start toreorganize and reorchestrate the use of theworld's resources. because one of the things that'sbeen happening, of course, is that as china goes onthis huge sort of spatial fix spending spree ona global basis, it needs a lot ofmineral resources. ecuador is in difficultiesbecause of the collapse of the oil prices. so what does ecuador do?

it borrows from the chinese. and what do thechinese want in return? they want open access toall the mineral resources of southern ecuador,which happens to be where a lot ofindigenous populations are. and those indigenouspopulations are not liking what's happening. and there's struggle going on. and guess what?

indigenous leadersare being killed. you all have heard the story,or you will hear more of it in due course. so this is thesort of thing that is going on with thiscompounding of growth. and we have to think stronglyabout how to manage it. furthermore, there is somethingelse which is going on, which is connectedto this, which is, what is thisgrowth actually about,

when you start to look at thenature of the urbanization process which is underway? it increasingly is thecase that the growth is about creatingpossibilities for investment. it's not about creatinga decent urban life. i mentioned thebrazilian case because it was about feeding theconstruction interests and getting labor and capitalemployed in construction. and that was that.

it was a temporary fix. but it wasn't about creatingdecent urban environments at all. there was no commitmentto that in the process. and what is sostriking right now is that we seem to becommitting ourselves not to creating citiesfor people to live in. when i mean "people," imean all people to live in. we're creating citiesfor people to invest in.

and the kinds ofthings we're building are for investment purposes. now why is this? and why do i even see it inramallah, as well as in turkey, whereas of course, in new york,london, and all the rest of it? and it has a lotto do with the fact that if you have surpluscapital and you're looking to save for your futureand for your family's future-- and this is where theindividualism comes in.

with that in mind, where do youput your money in these times? where's a safe place to put it? do you put it inthe stock market? do you keep it in monetaryinstruments of some kind, bonds, the rest of it? or do you put it in assets? and of course, a lot ofcapital has been flying into assets since the 1970s. but now it's so interesting.

the housing market and propertymarket went through a crash in 2007, 2008. but guess what? one of the primary objectivesof people right now to invest is in property and land. because many peoplejudge it to be more secure than almostanything else. gold-- that's also inthe picture, of course. so that if you kind of lookat a situation-- and i've

seen it both in turkeyand in palestine. you have this incrediblesituation, particularly in palestine where allof this is going on. i don't have to talk about that. but around ramallah,they're building these high-riseapartment blocks. and you say, who'sbuilding them? well, it's someof the people who have employment in thepalestinian authority, which

is notoriously corrupt. and those people whohave that employment are taking theirmoney, and they're putting it into propertybecause that is security. china recently hasloosened its regulations. and there's evidencein new york that one of the primary buyersof property in new york right now are chinese whoare getting their money out of the country oneway or the other

and buying property elsewhere. they're doing thesame in london. and it's not only thebillionaires who are doing it. it's actually uppermiddle class people who are engaging in theequivalent of a land grab. but it's a kind of a property. and even all pensionfunds are increasingly flowing into this direction. they've always hadan arm doing that.

unfortunately, it mightbelong to tiaa-cref. and they're doing somepretty ghastly things in latin america in termsof land grabs and things of that kind. so in fact, what we're seeingis a redirection of capital flow away from actually creatinga livable environment for the mass of thecitizens of any place to creating investmentopportunities for people who want to storetheir money and keep

their wealth in someform which they feel is fairly safe from anindividual standpoint. so they want to besure that they have it. of course, if you did that insyria, you lost out very badly. but other partsof the world, this is judged still to be aprimary form of investment. now again, what do youwant to do as a planner? do you want tospend all your time sort of trying to figureout how to create investment

opportunities for middleclass and upper class people so that they can invest in itand not necessarily live in it? or do you want to actually buildan alternative urbanization which is about what the peopleneed, and what they want, and how can it be done? and there is, therefore, ithink, a tremendous alienation right now in terms of whatthe urban process is about. and it's absolutelyno surprise to me that over the last15 years, some

of the major outbreaksof discontent which have occurred in the worldare about urban issues. gezi park-- what was that about? it wasn't a workingclass uprising. this was a cultural uprisingagainst the qualities of urban life, andthe authoritarianism, and the lack of democracy. and while there are allsorts of crazy things being done in this country and saidin this country and things

totally misguided, a lotof that, it seems to me, is connected. it's very much connectedto the foreclosure crisis. people lost their security. they lost their houses. they're angry. they need somebody to blame. they can't blame capitalbecause everybody tells them that's communist.

but the great thingabout bernie sanders is he's actually made socialismpartially respectable, particularly withpeople under 35. and he says tothem, oh, yeah, we should do awaywith student debt. and higher educationshould be free. and young people say, well,that sounds a pretty good idea. and if that'ssocialism, why not? so this is kind ofa crazy situation.

but it's also a point where wehave to think about the why. the why is very simple. it is rooted in thenature of capital. so it has to accumulate. and as marx put it, accumulationfor accumulation's sake is the center of capital. and you can either planfor the rest of your life further accumulation--in which case, good luck, because you'll be livingwith feet in cement

and then up to thewaist in cement. or you can kind of go, ok,we've had enough of this. and i'm a great admirerof many of the things that capital has done. and marx was too. he was very envious ofthe way in which capital had constructed things. and i think that we havea lot of things we can use in a completely different way.

but in order to dealwith that, we've got to get out of thisideological mess we've got ourselves intothat says, there are certain thingsthat can be said, and certain thingsthat can't be said. and those boundaries are asfirmly fixed in universities as they are anywhere else. and that is one of themore horrific things which i can report.

because these things arenot debated and discussed in the way they shouldbe debated and discussed in those institutions whichshould be discussing them. because the universitieshave been corporatized. they've been neoliberalized. and actually, theresistance is still there. and it's still open. but it's very, very weak. and something has tobe done about that.

and a lot of the discontentwhich exists-- and actually, it exists in a differentclass configuration. and the classconfiguration is actually approaching it from arather different dimension. and here, theoretically,i've had a big fight within the marxistfraternity, if it's that. it's more likely acircular firing squad. you see, marx talkedabout production a lot. volume 1 of capital is verymuch about the production

of value and surplus value. volume 2 is aboutrealization of value, and the realization ofsurplus value, that is. and marx is very clear, ingrundrisse and elsewhere, that in order tounderstand capital, you have to understandwhat he called the contradictory unity betweenproduction and realization. now volume 1 is readin marxist circles and revered, quiterightly, because it's

a magnificent book. volume 2 is hardly read atall because it's basically a bit unreadable. but if you don't read it,you don't understand capital. and unfortunately, alot of marxist's haven't understood capital. marx is very clear at the end ofthe first section of volume 1, chapter 1 that if youcannot realize the value in the market, thenit's not value.

this is whereanti-value comes in. and that means therecan often be struggles around the realization process. and where does therealization process occur? it occurs in neighborhoods. and in fact, capitalcan extract wealth as much from therealization process as it extracts fromthe production process. that you can paythe worker more,

and the worker goeshome and pays higher rents and pays more forthe-- they lose it back to the capitalist classin the form of rent. they get it inthe form of wages. and they lose it inthe form of rent. and actually, ifyou ask people, what are the major linesof exploitation? you mention creditcard companies. you mention landlords andrents and property speculation

prices. you mention what telephonecompanies do to your telephone bill by adding all theseweird charges which say you were roaming somewherewhere you weren't and things so there's a lot ofcrookedness goes on and a lot ofextraction of wealth, increasingly, from therealization process. and a lot of that is onthe streets of the city. so it's no accident that mostof the uprisings that there have

been, in brazil in 2013and in turkey in 2013, were more about thepolitics of realization than they were about thepolitics of production. and that this is where alot of the politics lies. and that is verydifficult to organize for a number ofparticular reasons. first, the classconfiguration that's involved in the extractionof wealth through realization is completely differentfrom that that

is involved in production. it's not capital versus laborin the realization process. it's capital versuseverybody else. so that middle classpeople-- i mean, if i go to a small restaurantowner in new york city and say, hey, howcome you're paying your workers so little money? the immediate response you wouldget from the family restaurant is, you don't understand.

i'm exploiting myselfat a huge rate. i get in here at6:00 in the morning. i don't go hometill 10:00 at night. i work my ass off. how can i possibly afford topay anybody very much more than i get? i say, well, wheredoes all the money go? to the bank, to the rentier. and so if i said tothat person, hey,

let's have an alliance againstthe banks and the rentier, i think the answer would be,yeah, that sounds a good idea. and i think you cansee elements of that even in what trump and thetea party and other people are talking about. there's something therethat needs to be configured. and we shouldn't simply dismisssome of these arguments. we've got to understand whythe arguments are being made the way they are and howthey can be reconfigured

around a politicalmovement that is actually going to bededicated to the idea that we want to create citiesthat are fit for people to live in. we don't want tocreate cities that are fit for people to invest in. you want to create citieswhich are about non-growth but are actually aboutsomething much more systematic. now marx had aninteresting comment, which

actually comes from hegel. he talked about thedifference between what he called a "bad infinity"and a "good infinity." a good infinityis something that continues to reproduceitself over time forever and ever and ever. and a circle is a kindof mathematical version of the good infinity. it's when the circle becomes aspiral that the problem starts.

things spiral out of control. capital is spiralingout of control. and that spiralingout of control is represented by the factthat the infinity is not contained in any way. it just goes furtherand further and further. the number systemis a bad infinity. for every bignumber you can make, there's always onemore you can add to it.

it goes on and on and on. and you never knowwhere it's going to go. it's like pi in theother direction. how many decimal pointsdo you put on pi? and a bad infinityis where we're at. and we have to get itback to a good infinity. and i think marxunderstood that very well because he's very strong aboutthe nature of reproduction, reproduction of the socialorder and how we can

think about the reproduction. it's when its reproductionon an expanded scale that the problems really start. and we've got to start toactually get ourselves back to thinking about thegood infinity, as opposed to the bad infinity of thingsspiraling out of control. and i think that metaphorof spiraling out of control is something whichis, i think, very meaningful to what ishappening globally and locally.

i think that untilwe can find means to control that, there willbe no amount of tinkering and doing good things on theedges which is really going to make that much of adifference to what seems to me a huge macroeconomic problem. thanks very much. do we have time forquestions or discussion? yes. ok.

yeah? [inaudible] yeah, yeah. yeah, yeah, come on. oh, ok. thanks. so when you were talkingabout china, the overcapacity, in the light of everythingyou were saying-- so much of which makes a lot of sense tome-- i found myself wondering,

well, whence the necessityfor the investment to address the-- i acceptthe overcapacity or the level of capacity. but whence the necessity toinvest it for china in the way that you're talking about? which i guess getsback to capital and the marxian analysis,which maybe you'd care to elaborateon a little further. well, if you've got surpluscapital and labor which

is involved in, say, steeland cement production, there are two things you can do. you can either just close downa lot of the cement and steel works and havemajor unemployment, which the chinese are verynervous about for good reason. because all the reportsthat come out suggest there's a good deal ofpotential labor unrest in china. so their thingis, well, maybe we can use some of thissurplus capacity--

keep as much ofthis-- i mean, they're trying to curb some of this. and there's no question they'retrying to bring some of it down. but at the sametime, they're going to say, ok, arethere ways we can use this productively elsewhere? yeah, there are. there are all these projects.

i didn't mention the newpanama canal, for example, is another one. all of these huge mega-projectswhich the chinese are willing to undertake andfund because this, i think, keeps employmentlevels at a level which is maybe more acceptable. whether they're right that majorlabor unrest is potentially around the corner and theauthority of the party might be in question if it cannotmanage that unemployment,

i don't know. but that's a typicalquestion which arises in states of overaccumulation. throughout thehistory of capitalism, again and again, we'veseen overaccumulation of capital of various kinds--producing things, the railroad overinvestment inthe 19th century, all those kinds of things. and the answer iseither it just crashes,

and you have an immediatepolitical crisis, and you have a kind ofrevolution or something or you try and manage it insome way so actually it doesn't. so i think it's an attemptby china to manage it. thanks, professor harvey. this is a wonderful,wonderful talk. and i definitely agreethat it's really important to emphasize this notion ofcapital realization by marx. but i also feelthat there is sort

of a parallel between thisnotion of capital realization and what polanyi talks aboutas market forces and market society, this notion thatthe really important part of capitalism is notjust about production but about consumption, marketexchange, and commodification. and i think polanyi is sortof optimistic in the sense that he doesbelieve that society is able to wagecollective action against the commodificationof labor, land,

and money, like againstbankers and rentiers. so do you think hisoptimism is warranted? or do you think this politicsaround capital realization is much harder than what wehave already imagined before? the main difference betweenpolanyi and marx on realization is this, that marx spendsa lot of time talking about two kinds of consumption. one is finalconsumption, which is what you and i--and the other is

what he calls productiveconsumption, which is investment in infrastructures. in the chinesecase, for example, it's not consumerismin the sense we mean it in this countrythat is driven in a realization process. it's productive consumptionand creating new fixed capital investments and infrastructuresand things of that kind. so it's a differentkind of consumption

which is supposed toimprove productivity. now the big question is,are all the investments that have been madeactually contributing to rising productivity? 50% of the chinese economyhas been driven, particularly over the last five or sixyears, by physical investment infrastructures. 25% alone by housing. and it's not clear tome that a 50% investment

of your gdp in that kindof productive consumption is getting a good rate ofreturn when the rate of return, in terms of the growthof the chinese economy, is now sinkingdown to around 6%. and some people thinkit's much lower. so productiveconsumption runs out because you're creating fixedcapital for something that doesn't arrive. this is classic.

my classic exampleof that is the case of cuidad real, justsouth of madrid, which is one of thesespeculative building projects. and they built a new airportto which no planes have flown. the result is thatthey had a 2 billion euro kind of airportsitting there doing nothing. and last summer theytried to auction it off. and the top bidwas 10,000 euros. so if you've got11,000 euros and you

fancy having an airport in themiddle of spain, be my guest. so this is what i mean by--the building of the airport is productive consumption. but it's not realized, again,by planes flying there and using it and this kind of stuff. so but that's a bigdifference between marx and polanyi is marx is very muchaware that consumption is not simply about final consumption. it's about productiveconsumption

plus final consumption. and marx, of course, isalso very well aware in ways that polanyi was notquite very clear about. that is that if you'reextracting surplus value from the laborers, thepayment of the laborers tends to go down. and if the paymentof the laborers go down, as it has done since1970s-- labor has not received more money-- then themarket, the final market,

in terms of consumerdemand from working people, is basically stymied. and the only way you can dealwith that is the credit system. and the creditsystem goes belly up, which it had someproblems with in 2008. so marx has a much finerway of understanding this. but i always liked polanyi. i thought it was a veryhelpful way station on the way to reading marx.

so people who-- i used todisguise my marxism by saying i was quoting polanyiwhen i wasn't. i had all these greatdisguises, by the way. i first started teachingcapital in a geography program. and for five years-- inan engineering school. and for five years, thecentral administration thought i was teaching acourse on capital cities. and it was onlyfive years later, when the course waswell-established

and people gave it some verygood things that they said, they couldn't do much about it. so yeah. but polanyi, it's good. um. oh, excuse me. you talked aboutthe spatial fix idea for what peopledo when they have to work with surplus capital.

and you gave the exampleof going from haussmann to the suburbanizationto what china is doing. we also see a scale change,a huge scale change. yeah. and it's quite bothersomebecause i am a believer in the law of dialectics. so quantitative changeslead to qualitative changes. so what do you see as thebig macroeconomic threat with this hugescale change that we

are witnessing with what chinais doing with surplus capital investment? yeah, the scale change--i mean, this, by the way, parallels some of thethings that giovanni arrighi points out in his studyof shifting hegemony. and the big question is thatif the us is not as hegemonic as it once was, howare we going to think about hegemonic center tothe dynamics of capital accumulation?

and there are many, many signsthat it is, of course, breaking apart into regional hegemons,so that germany doesn't take much notice of whatthe us says anymore and does his own thing. and europe, brazilis pretty hegemonic, and latin america, of course,united states and china and the far east. so you're really moving intothese regional hegemonic structures, which is bothersomein the following sense--

that the history of situationswhere there is no clear global hegemonic power, butthere's regional-- [sneezes] excuse me. there's regionalhegemonic configurations-- is that they can getagainst each other. and of course, that's typicallyled to global conflicts and global wars. geopolitically,we're seeing some

of the consequences of thatin the middle east right now with russia versus theunited states versus european union. so i think thatthe scale problem of how capital isworking is such that you really need globalregulation of many aspects. we need global regulationof financial flows. you need globalregulation to deal with issues like climatechange and species extinction

and habitat destruction. but we don't really see anythingvery serious happening on that. and i know thereare negotiations. but the really seriousstuff that needs to be done is not being done. so you may be saved from beingup to your neck in cement by being up toyour neck in water with sea level rise orsomething of that kind. the question of globalhegemonic configuration

is one which arrighi,of course, was adamant that this didn't mean thatchina was becoming the hegemon, because the global economyis now so integrated. and the point here is you haveto think about compound growth on everything that's going onin the global economy right now. and you think about it30 years out from now. and you'll see amazing,amazing things. i actually went to brazilseveral times in the 1970s and didn't go back again a lottill the last five, six years.

and i went back tosome of the cities i knew in the early 1970s. and they're totallyunrecognizable, totally unrecognizable. you sort of come inon a superhighway. you've got condominiums. you've got megashopping centers. you've got high-risestuff going on around you. i mean, in every city,recife, fortaleza, whatever.

and this is thestyle of urbanization which you're seeingall over the place. and you get what i thinkare just insane economies emerging out of this. my favorite one issao paolo, which rests on automobileproduction as economic base. so they produce aload of automobiles that then go sit in trafficjams for hours on end. and you can't say, this isnot a very sensible economy.

this is insane. why don't you stopproducing automobiles? they say, well, theeconomy would collapse. so are you going to produceeven more automobiles? yeah, we're going to expandthe automobile industry as much as we can. and you kind of go, well,where are they going to go? you've already got all the mainstreets absolutely, totally, totally-- and that's whereyou traffic engineers come in.

you've got to engineerit in such a way as to, somehow or other, get15 lane highways or something like that through the center ofthe city, which is going to be a very nice place to live in. you know, with 15-lane highways. i mean, i'm sure you'llenjoy that environment. so i think the hegemonyquestion is a big one. and unfortunately,the left doesn't have any particular answer to that.

the left is obsessedwith local initiatives are somehow the answer. people misinterpretme when i say that, as if i'm againstlocal initiatives. i'm not. i think pretty muchall politics originates with local initiatives. but if it originates and staysthere, then that's the problem. the problem is to scale upthe politics to something

rather different. and the left hasnot actually been thinking about thatsort of thing very much. so i have a lot ofadmiration for what the anarchists and autonomistasare talking about that. but i have profounddisagreements with them when it comes to issues ofthis kind, of how to scale up and what should happenwhen you scale up. yeah, hi.

i guess i want to apologize forasking a hypothetical question. why? why apologize for that? if you were giving thissame lecture to an audience in china, how would you-- i'm going to do thatthis summer, by the way. yeah, so how would yourephrase this lecture? i wouldn't rephrase it at all. no?

why would-- so what would the mainpoints of leverage be in that context for you,in the chinese audience? i have no idea. i'll find out when i get there. look, my contactswith chinese academics and some chinesepeople in the party, i found it possible to talkabout many of these things. i think they're super aware.

they obviously haveto be super aware because life expectancyin northern china has declined by about 5 yearsin about the last 10 or 15 years because of thedensity of air pollution. and they know they haveto do something about it. they know theirrivers are sewers. and they're very aware of a lotof these kinds of questions. so i think they recognizethat right now they're involved in certain things.

so i don't think it's impossibleto have a decent conversation. i've had decent conversationsin this country with visiting people on these topics. and i see no reason when i go tochina that i would say anything different to the chinese. i might change someof my examples. but that's about it. and i'd add a little morecriticism of the united states, just to--

because the unitedstates deserves a lot. i mean, you know. professor harvey, i waswondering, where would you locate some of the sourcesof this ideological mess you're talking about? which are theinstitutions where we could go and historizeto understand what is happening right now? well, i tried to getmy version of it, which

is in the book onneoliberalism, when it was clear in the early1970s that corporate capital and the big wealthy classesfelt deeply threatened by what was a certain declinein their wealth, and certainly a feelingthat there had been a power shift towards labor. and if you look atthe legislation that went through congressunder nixon-- and it got signed by nixon--it created the environmental

protection agency. it created osha. it created consumer protection. a whole raft oflegislation which was curbing capitalist class power. and there was a famousmemo from somebody who eventually went onthe supreme court saying, we've got to havea counter-strategy to all of this.

and all of theseinstitutions got together. the big business bureau andall of those institutions got together. this is when theydecided, at that time, that the universitieswere impossible. they should be surroundedby think tanks producing alternative information. and that's when they founded theolin foundation, the manhattan institute, theheritage foundation.

all the foundations wereset up by big capital. and their job was to producean alternative understanding of the world. and this was funded by themajor corporate and individuals. in new york, for example,the rockefeller brothers played a very important rolein doing this kind of thing. so my own university, cuny,didn't charge-- had no tuition fees at the time. so there was a hugefight over tuition.

and it was mainly led by therockefeller brothers, who went through the various-- theywent through places like-- they controlled the reader's digest. so they had a whole slewof articles coming out in the reader's digestsaying things like, you know, free education ispoor education. if you want goodeducation, you've got to pay for it,that kind of thing. so there's a huge ideologicalfight on that level.

and of course, then thiswhole kind of individualism and reaganism andthatcherism all came in. and this issupported by-- again, britain had analogousinstitutions which were the center of it. they co-opted theswedish bankers to create somethingcalled the nobel prize in economics,which they promptly gave to hayek and friedman.

so i tried to laya lot of that out. so this was aninstitutional response to what was felt to be adesperate situation on the part of corporate capital. and even in this country,corporate capital and the capitalist class. and they were, ofcourse, successful. now, of course, a lot of thatsuccess is breaking apart. because as we see withthe republican party,

the republican party is there todo the bidding of the wealthy. but it does it on thebacks of or support from low-income populations. but they've done nothing. the new york times had apiece-- i think it was today, actually-- which istalking about the fact that the grassroots ofthe republican party say these people inthe republican party have done nothingwhatsoever for us.

so that's why we wantsomebody different. this is why we'revoting for trump. but to be honest, cruz frightensme more than trump, frankly. but ideologically-- and it'sbeen increasingly difficult. we're increasingly put insituations where we can only act in a neoliberal way. i think it's veryclear that we are all neoliberals without knowing itin that a lot of our decision making is now kind of actuallyconstituted in such a way

that there was onlyone way we can go. and that's going to takea big change of mentality to bring back some notionsof communal action, communal solidarity,which is why i do like a lot ofthe local initiatives to try to talkabout urban commons. i do like many of theattempts to create what you might callunalienated spaces in a sea of urban alienation.

this, to me, again, is avery important initiatives. but changing thementalities of populations is going to be extremely,extremely difficult. but we think radically differentnow than we did in the 1970s. and even i find myself beingneoliberal on occasions, particularly when i look atmy pension fund and think-- i get that, you know? but again, you see, that--if you could give security to people who arewithout pension funds,

this would be somethingradically, radically different. because you commitpeople to-- pension funds are invested inthe stock market. so if you crashthe stock market, everybody's pensionfund goes under. so there's a vested interestin saving the stock market. so when there's a centralbank to quantitative easing-- which, by the way, is a verygood example of bad infinity because the central bankis simply adding zeros

to the money supply. when it did quantitativeeasing, the money simply flowed into the stockmarket, a jacked up stock market, which is greatfor my pension fund. so i benefited from that. and i'm very grateful. but at the same time, idon't want it to happen. and so we all getinternally conflicted about things like that.

but that's the way in whichthings are structured now into this kind of thing where,for me to go after capital and to say, let's closedown the stock market, let's really wreckthe stock market-- which as a real revolutionary,i should want to do. and i kind of go, oh,my god, my pension fund. what will happen? so we all getdilemmas of that kind. and we're all of us in that.

professor harvey, thankyou for your lecture. it's very well placed inmany respects in the sense that we findourselves in a space where political subjectivities,like you put it, are firmly being cementedby the sheer force of debt that we accumulate. and to the questionof the spirals, the macroeconomic spirals thatare getting out of control, where would-- in your opinionor from your perspective--

be strategic places tostart attacking, dismantling that spiral? and what role does universityplay in that process? well, europe has beenpretty much a dead space, for me anyway, overthe last few years. it's livened up some, tothe degree that now there are movements like podemosand so on in spain. and now what we're seeing--and this is, i think, an interesting feature.

in many parts ofthe world, there is a political interestin capturing local power. we even see it in this country. we see it inseattle, for example, raising the minimum wage. los angeles, raisingtheir minimum wage. and radical mayorsand city councils can start to actuallyconsolidate things at a different levelthan can typically

be done by a localneighborhood organization. but it would take acoalition between the two so that if, for example,one of the answers to affordable housing issues issomething like community land trusts, you need thecity council to help you get the land and doall those kinds of things. and when the city council doesthat, as happened in montreal some years ago, thenyou can actually get off-markethousing developing

in very significantareas of the city. so the fact that you've gotradical mayors in barcelona, madrid, and the likesuggests that something is going on at that level. i've just came backfrom brazil supporting the campaign ofmarcelo freixo, who's kind of working on the themeof-- "if the city was ours" is the slogan of the campaign. and it's an attempt to--he's running for mayor.

and he has a bit of a shot ofgetting it-- a lot of barriers. so i think there'smovement of various kinds which is beginning to occur. and movements of this kindcan be sort of small tremors that then becomemajor earthquakes. or they could just becomesmall tremors, and that's it. but i think there issomething going on at that level in manyparts of the world, which i think is encouraging.

and what i see in certainplaces is that-- for instance, a country which seems to havesorted some of this out-- i was very impressed earlierin the year-- or last year. i was in uruguay. and i was talking with mujicaand some of the academics in the university who weresupporting the social housing projects and the like. and sort of pushing the politicseven further, or in this case, keeping the politicsout as far left

as they can possibly keepit after mujica stepped down from the presidency. so i think spaces arechanging very fast. and in exactly thesame way, you don't know where the crisisis going to hit next. you don't know whichcountry is suddenly going to declare it's close tobankruptcy and god knows what. so i think we don't reallyknow what kind of movements are going to erupt where.

it's a very volatile situation. nobody in turkey expectedgezi park to occur. and gezi park was a process. unfortunately, it triggeredalso another process by erdogan, which is a processtowards a totally autocratic, rather brutal kindof police state. which is unfortunatelybeing not challenged at all by the europeanunion because turkey is housing about 2million syrian refugees.

and i think the threat of theturks is to open the gates and shove them all intoeurope and then see what-- so in order to keep them there,the european union is not saying anything about thefact that people who signed a letter just talking aboutto negotiate with the kurds and not kill them lost theirjobs, are being, in some cases, prosecuted, probably goingto be spending time in jail. so more than about1,500 academics are under suspicionand under arrest.

we know, at the same time,that certain cities or towns in southeast anatolia arebeing put under martial law, that nobody is allowedon the streets. and actually, people areactually starving to death in some of those towns. so there's killingsgoing on at that rate. and the kurdish questionhas become a violent one. so my point here is thatnobody would have predicted this two or three years ago.

things are moving veryfast, are very volatile. in the same way that brazil, twoyears ago, everybody was happy. they had a lot of moneyand all this stuff. now everybody's desperatebecause there's been basically an economic collapse. same is true in ecuador. same is true, to somedegree, in bolivia, all of those countries providingraw materials to china. so we don't know at all wherethings are going to happen.

but again, one of thethings that capital is often very, very good at is beinghighly flexible and very adaptive in its strategies. and that's somethingthat the left needs to learn fromcapitalists-- how to be adaptive and adeptand fast in your strategies. and in fact, the leftis very conservative. my marxist friends are stuckin the mud a lot of the time. it's kind of really chronic.

and so you kind ofsay, what's the help? what's the point of the leftif it can't actually change its view from 1930 to now? and this is part of the problem. and the dynamic partof the left is actually more likely to be thecultural producers who are playing a very importantrole in a lot of this. the people wholaunched the gezi thing were more out ofthe cultural level.

the people who launchedthe brazilian 2013 were very muchanimated by that sort of-- coming from thatkind of background. again, it was thepolitics of realization that was involvedthere, rather than the politics of production. and i have a hardtime getting people on the left to recognizethe politics of realization as being where we arereally at right now,

and where we should reallybe mobilizing and mobilizing around the differentmateriality of what is involved in that form of organization. versus what hastraditionally been a sort of left which is animated bythe politics of production. so i'm not saying the politicsof production is irrelevant. don't get me wrong on that. but we've got to actuallycreate alternative politics. and i haven't seen thatemerging very much in europe

at all, except now in spain. but again, these thingsmove very quickly, as we've seen in this countryover the last two or three years. i mean, who would havethought bernie sanders would be where he's at? it's quite amazing that somebodywho claims to be a socialist-- [cheering and applause] --is actually getting votes.

and when he gets 70% of thevote in the state of washington, you kind of go, thisis really something. um-- apparently, it's-- uh-- sorry. are you going? sorry, i've beenwaiting for a while. sure, go ahead.

thank you. sorry for interrupting. i was wondering, what aresome possibilities for what it would look liketo have a society and an economy organizedaround good infinities rather than bad infinities? can we make thatthe last question? i've been told i shouldmake this the last question. but i'm going to disobey.

and i'll have acouple more questions. [laughter, cheering, and applause] look, there are a number offormats which we can look at. i've always been a littlebit of a secret fan of murray bookchin's writingson urbanization and the like. which is not to say that hewas a nice guy or anything like that, because he wasn't. but his idea about kindof municipal organization and confederalsocialism seems to be

one of the ways in which onecan start to organize around the politics of realization. and one of the strengthsof podemos in spain is that they grewout of a lot of kind of assembly-type reconstructionsof political organization and political power. so they still have somerootedness in that, even as they've gone national. now how that rootedness is beingmaintained, i'm not quite sure.

and i always fear that thingslike that, the rootedness will disappear and get neglected. but something similaris happening in rojava, for example, where thekurdish pkk is organizing on bookchinesque principals ofassembly structures of decision making. which, to some degree, ispartly coming out of bookchin, partly out of the experienceof the zapatista movement. so how you start to deliverresources and deliver

basic necessities to populationsin times of difficulty or in times oftrouble becomes a kind of a-- there emerges aform of sociality which is radically differentfrom the sort of possessive individualismthat dominates in a neoliberal world. and we see some ofthat, particularly in the wake of disastersof various kinds. when the people who are involvedin the occupy movement in new

york rallied aroundtrying to deal with the aftermathof sandy, they did a faster and better jobthan any of the official relief services. and i think what they showedwas that something that's built upon lines like thatcan be very efficient and very effective. unfortunately, it tends tobe that it's reconstruction of the existing social orderthat was involved there,

rather than a transformationof political consciousness on the part of thosepeople being helped. and so i thinkthere are examples of this kind where things happenin a different kind of way. and the interestingthing is that when they happen in adifferent kind of way, when people get embeddedin those things happening in a different kindof way, they start to say things like,well, we don't

have to do it this old way. we have alternatives. i think that it'spossible to talk about utopian alternatives. and i think it's very good thatpeople have utopian designs. and i'm all in favor of that. but i think that the bestteacher on this is experience. and i know from, forinstance, turkish colleagues that the experience ofparticipating in the gezi

process made aradical difference to the way in which theythought about themselves in relationship to thesociety going on around them. i think this was true ofthe occupy sandy people too. and that there is agrowing consciousness that we don't have to dothings in this completely neoliberal way. and we can do things on amuch more collective basis. and so, yes, thereare alternatives.

but it takes the mixtureof enough people who have the ideas abouthow to do it differently and enough experience ofdoing it differently to show that it actually can work. and as happenedwith occupy sandy, show that it couldwork even better than all the bureaucratizedcorporate and corporatized systems of relief thathave been structured into the way the state operatedand the way in which the red

cross is organized. so i think there arereal possibilities. and this is where some ofthe small-scale solidarity economies and the like,i think, have something important to teach us. and can be the basisfor alternative ways to get us out of the necessityof continuing to grow, grow, grow, grow, and get us backto a virtuous infinity, which is a reproduction ofsocial life adequately

and appropriately for allthe people in the population. so i will takeone more question. there's one somewhere down here. it seems that-- --the human population isgoing to-- it seems inevitable that it's going to beincreasing by several billions over the next decades. and part of this isused as a justification for grow, grow, grow.

you didn't map thispopulation growth onto your critique of capital. and i wondered if you wouldmake a few comments in that way. yeah, well, i've always beentold that we can only actually solve the global poverty problemby growing because we can only redistribute out of growth. and of course, we've had growth. and there's no redistribution. so that story's a silly one.

yeah, there's apopulation growth issue. interestingly, thecase of germany was so fascinatingthat a lot of people didn't want to welcomethe immigrants. merkel kind of said, we needthe labor, so bring them in. and of course, thedemographics of europe are zero populationgrowth, close to that. and there's going to bea real problem, again, about the futurebecause the working

population is diminishing whilethe older population is rising. and so you've got a crisisof pensions and all kinds of things coming up. and the obviousway to resolve it would be to open thefloodgates and let all of the syrians in andeverybody else who will come in and bolster the population. but that then generatesall of the negative stuff about immigration.

so i think thatthere are features of this in population growth. if we look at where thepopulation is growing and what it's about andwhere the population is not growing-- of course,half the world is pretty close to zero growth. much of europe is actuallyclose to zero growth. japan is zero growth. china is actually down to akind of-- and everybody's kind

of now worriedbecause they think that china's going to beovertaken by india in terms of population because there'sno population-- no one child policy. and of course, the chinesehave recently abandoned that. so the population growthissue is an important one. it would be myobservation that, yeah, a stable population probably,at some time in the future, is going to be just asnecessary as a stable economy.

but that doesn't meanthat somehow or other we have to keep on growingto accommodate that growing population. in fact, it means itthe other way around, as far as i'm concerned. it means that certainparts of the world have to learn to deal with less. we can start, in this country,with the following factoid-- which i've forgottenwhere i got it from.

probably the financialtimes since that's my usual source of informationthese days, which is very good. and it pointed outthat about a third of the christmas presents boughtin this country are never used. most of them arejunked immediately. well, we can stop buyingall those christmas presents because they're goingstraight into the-- they're only used once. or they're thrown awayor something like that.

so find a different way togive a christmas present, which would be something like,be nice to somebody. wouldn't that be a nice-- go on. give somebody a hug, you know? give them five hugs orsomething like that. and if you're really fondof them give them 10. so we could start with,how much consumption is complete junk in this country? and people recognize that.

but then peopleget angry at you. my daughter is convinced thatthe country will go to the dogs if people took my approachto buying clothes. i once had a taxi driverin philadelphia ask me. he said, are you an academic? i said, yeah. he said, you should beashamed of yourself. i said, why? dressing like that, he said.

i said, what do you mean? and he said, well, there areall these unemployed tailors and makers of suitsin philadelphia. and you go around dressedlike some sort of-- you should be grown up,not a sort of hippie wearing that kind ofjumpers and things, he said. get yourself agood suit, he said. and then he backedoff because he thought he wouldn't geta tip at the end of it.

but i thought it was avery nice thing to say. but so i thinkthere's a lot that can be done in terms ofreduction, obviously, which wouldn't be missed at all. and i think allthis fetish stuff about everybody goingcrazy about christmas presents and sales-- i'mnot against consumption. i'm all in favor of goodfood and things like that. but i am saying that there's alot of ways in which we could

do with much, much less, withan actual improvement in quality of life rather than adiminution of quality of life. and i think that thereare ways to go about that. so i think the redistributioncan be accomplished even within a situationof very slow growth, provided that there isa recognition that this is an essential feature ofwhat our future should be about and how it shouldbe constructed. but at some point or other,the population question

also has to be resolved. and i think that, of course,in some parts of the world it has been resolved. we're at zero growth inmany parts of the world. and then those parts ofthe world which are not are usually thosewhich are unstable, where the social securitymechanisms are very low. and as everybody recognizes,one of the best ways towards population stabilizationis the education of women.

it is an absolutelycrucial feature. any country which has a veryelaborate education of women immediately experiences,i think, tremendous kind of shifts in demographics. and i think thatthat's, again, one of the features ofany social order which i think wouldbe absolutely crucial. so i think we're goingto leave it there. so thank you all very much.