by David Harvey, The White Review
From time immemorial there have been human beings who have
believed that they could construct, individually or collectively, a better
world for themselves than that which they had inherited. Quite a lot of them
also came to believe that in the course of so doing it might be possible to
remake themselves as different if not better people. I count myself among those
who believe in both these propositions. In Rebel Cities, for example, I argued
that ‘the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the
question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations
we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of life we desire,
what aesthetic values we hold’. The right to the city, I wrote, is ‘far more
than a right of individual or group access to the resources that the city
embodies: it is a right to change and re-invent the city more after our heart’s
desire … The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is … one of
the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.’[1] Perhaps for this
intuitive reason, the city has been the focus throughout its history of an
immense outpouring of utopian desires for happier futures and less alienating
times.
The belief that we can through conscious thought and action
change both the world we live in and ourselves for the better defines a
humanist tradition. The secular version of this tradition overlaps with and has
often been inspired by religious teachings on dignity, tolerance, compassion,
love and respect for others. Humanism, both religious and secular, is a world
view that measures its achievements in terms of the liberation of human
potentialities, capacities and powers. It subscribes to the Aristotelian vision
of the uninhibited flourishing of individuals and the construction of ‘the good
life’. Or, as one contemporary renaissance man, Peter Buffett defines it, a
world which guarantees to individuals ‘the true flourishing of his or her
nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life’.[2]
This tradition of thought and action has waxed and waned
from time to time and from place to place but never seems to die. It has had to
compete, of course, with more orthodox doctrines that variously assign our
fates and fortunes to the gods, to a specific creator and deity, to the blind
forces of nature, to social evolutionary laws enforced through genetic legacies
and mutations, by iron laws of economics that dictate the course of
technological evolution, or to some hidden teleology dictated by the world
spirit. Humanism also has its excesses and its dark side. The somewhat
libertine character of renaissance humanism led one of its leading exponents,
Erasmus, to worry that the Judaeo-Christian tradition was being traded in for
those of Epicurus. Humanism has sometimes lapsed into a Promethean and
anthropocentric view of human capacities and powers in relationship to
everything that exists – including nature – even to the point where some
deluded beings believe that we, being next to God, are Übermenschen
having dominion over the universe. This form of humanism becomes even more
pernicious when identifiable groups in a population are not considered worthy
of being considered human. This was the fate of many indigenous populations in
the Americas as they faced colonial settlers. Designated as ‘savages’, they
were considered a part of nature and not a part of humanity. Such tendencies
are alive and well in certain circles, leading the radical feminist Catherine
MacKinnon to write a book on the question, Are Women Human?[3] That such
exclusions have in many people’s eyes a systematic and generic character in
modern society is indicated by the popularity of Giorgio Agamben’s formulation
of ‘the state of exception’ in which so many people now exist in the world
(with the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay being a prime example).[4]
There are plenty of contemporary signs that the enlightened
humanist tradition is alive and well, perhaps even staging a comeback. This is
the spirit that clearly animates the hordes of people employed around the world
in NGOs and other charitable institutions whose mission is to improve the life
chances and prospects of the less fortunate. There are even vain attempts to
dress up capital itself in the humanist garb of what some corporate leaders
like to call Conscious Capitalism, a species of entrepreneurial ethics that
looks suspiciously like conscience laundering along with sensible proposals to
improve worker efficiency by seeming to be nice to them.[5] All the nasty
things that happen are absorbed as unintentional collateral damage in an
economic system motivated by the best of ethical intentions. Humanism is,
however, the spirit that inspires countless individuals to give of themselves
unstintingly and often without material reward to contribute selflessly to the
well-being of others. Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist humanisms have
spawned widespread religious and charitable organisations, as well as iconic
figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and Bishop Tutu.
Within the secular tradition there are many varieties of humanist thought and
practice, including explicit currents of cosmopolitan, liberal, socialist and
Marxist humanism. and, of course, moral and political philosophers have over
the centuries devised a variety of conflicting ethical systems of thought based
in a variety of ideals of justice, cosmopolitan reason and emancipatory liberty
that have from time to time supplied revolutionary slogans. Liberty, equality,
fraternity were the watchwords of the French revolution. The earlier US
Declaration of Independence, followed by the US Constitution and, perhaps even
more significantly, that stirring document called the Bill of Rights have all
played a role in animating subsequent political movements and constitutional
forms. The remarkable constitutions recently adopted in Bolivia and Ecuador
show that the art of writing progressive constitutions as the basis for
regulating human life is by no means dead. And the immense literature that this
tradition has spawned has not been lost on those who have sought a more
meaningful life. Just think of the past influence of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man
or Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman within the
English-speaking world to see what I mean (almost every tradition in the world
has analogous writings to celebrate).
There are two well-known undersides to all of this, both of
which we have already encountered. The first is that however noble the
universal sentiments expressed at the outset, it has time and again proved hard
to stop the universality of humanist claims being perverted for the benefit of
particular interests, factions and classes. This is what produces the
philanthropic colonialism of which Peter Buffett so eloquently complains. This
is what twists Kant’s noble cosmopolitanism and quest for perpetual peace into
a tool of imperialist and colonial cultural domination, currently represented
by the Hilton Hotel cosmopolitanism of CNN and the frequent business-class
flier. This is the problem that has bedevilled the doctrines of human rights
enshrined in a UN declaration that privileges the individual rights and private
property of liberal theory at the expense of collective relations and cultural
claims. This is what turns the ideals and practices of freedom into a tool of
governmentality for the reproduction and perpetuation of capitalist class
affluence and power. The second problem is that the enforcement of any
particular system of beliefs and rights always involves some disciplinary
power, usually exercised by the state or some other institutionalised authority
backed by force. The difficulty here is obvious. The UN declaration implies
state enforcement of individual human rights when the state so often is first
in line violating those rights.
The difficulty with the humanist tradition in short is that
it does not internalise a good understanding of its own inescapable internal
contradictions, most clearly captured in the contradiction between freedom and
domination. The result is that humanist leanings and sentiments often get
presented these days in a somewhat offhand and embarrassed way, except when
their position is safely backed by religious doctrine and authority. There is,
as a result, no full-blooded contemporary defence of the propositions of or
prospects for a secular humanism even though there are innumerable individual
works that loosely subscribe to the tradition or even polemicise as to its
obvious virtues (as happens in the NGO world). Its dangerous traps and
foundational contradictions, particularly questions of coercion, violence and
domination, are shied away from because they are too awkward to confront. The
result is what Frantz Fanon characterised as ‘insipid humanitarianism’. There
is plenty of evidence of that manifest in its recent revival. The bourgeois and
liberal tradition of secular humanism forms a mushy ethical base for largely
ineffective moralising about the sad state of the world and the mounting of equally
ineffective campaigns against the plights of chronic poverty and environmental
degradation. It is probably for this reason that the French philosopher Louis
Althusser launched his fierce and influential campaign back in the 1960s to
eject all talk of socialist humanism and alienation from the Marxist tradition.
The humanism of the young Marx, as expressed in The Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844, Althusser argued, was separated from the scientific Marx
of Capital by an ‘epistemological rupture’ that we ignore at our peril. Marxist
humanism, he wrote, is pure ideology, theoretically vacuous and politically
misleading, if not dangerous. The devotion of a dedicated Marxist like the
long-imprisoned Antonio Gramsci to the ‘absolute humanism of human history’
was, in Althusser’s view, entirely misplaced.[6]
The enormous increase in and nature of the complicitous
activities of the humanist NGOs over recent decades would seem to support
Althusser’s criticisms. The growth of the charitable industrial complex mainly
reflects the need to increase ‘conscience laundering’ for a world’s oligarchy
that is doubling its wealth and power every few years in the midst of economic
stagnation. Their work has done little or nothing in aggregate to deal with
human degradation and dispossession or proliferating environmental degradation.
This is structurally so because anti-poverty organisations are required to do
their work without ever interfering in the further accumulation of the wealth
from which they derive their sustenance. If everyone who worked in an
anti-poverty organisation converted overnight to an anti-wealth politics we
would soon find ourselves living in a very different world. Very few charitable
donors, not even Peter Buffett I suspect, would fund that. And the NGOs, which
are now at the centre of the problem, would not in any case want that (though
there are many individuals within the NGO world who would but simply can’t).
So what kind of humanism do we need in order to
progressively change the world through anti-capitalist work into another kind
of place populated by different kinds of people?
There is, I believe, a crying need to articulate a secular
revolutionary humanism that can ally with those religious-based humanisms (most
clearly articulated in both Protestant and Catholic versions of the theology of
liberation as well as in cognate movements within Hindu, Islamic, Jewish and
indigenous religious cultures) to counter alienation in its many forms and to
radically change the world from its capitalist ways. There is a strong and
powerful – albeit problematic – tradition of secular revolutionary humanism
both with respect to both theory and political practice. This is a form of
humanism that Louis Althusser totally rejected. But, in spite of Althusser’s
influential intervention, it has a powerful and articulate expression in the
Marxist and radical traditions as well as beyond. It is very different from
bourgeois liberal humanism. It refuses the idea that there is an unchanging or
pre-given ‘essence’ of what it means to be human and forces us to think hard
about how to become a new kind of human. It unifies the Marx of Capital with
that of The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and arrows in to the
heart of the contradictions of what any humanist programme must be willing to
embrace if it is to change the world. It clearly recognises that the prospects
for a happy future for most are invariably marred by the inevitability of
dictating the unhappiness of some others. A dispossessed financial oligarchy
which cannot any more partake of caviar and champagne lunches on their yachts
moored off the Bahamas will doubtless complain at their diminished fates and
fortunes in a more egalitarian world. We may, as good liberal humanists, even
feel a bit sorry for them. Revolutionary humanists steel themselves against
that thought. While we may not approve of this ruthless approach to dealing
with such contradictions, we have to acknowledge the basic honesty and
self-awareness of the practitioners.
Consider, as one example, the revolutionary humanism of
someone like Frantz Fanon. Fanon was a psychiatrist working in hospitals in the
midst of a bitter and violent anti-colonial war (rendered so memorable in
Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers – a film, incidentally, that the US
military now uses for anti-insurgency training purposes). Fanon wrote in depth
about the struggle for freedom and liberty on the part of colonised peoples
against the colonisers. His analysis, though specific to the Algerian case,
illustrates the sorts of issues that arise in any liberation struggle,
including those between capital and labour. But it does so in stark dramatic
and more easily legible terms precisely because it incorporates the additional
dimensions of racial, cultural and colonial oppressions and degradations giving
rise to an ultra-violent revolutionary situation from which no peaceful exit
seems possible. The foundational question for Fanon is how to recover a sense
of humanity on the basis of the dehumanising practices and experiences of
colonial domination. ‘As soon as you and your fellow men are cut down like
dogs,’ he writes in The Wretched of the Earth, ‘there is no other solution but
to use every means available to re-establish your weight as a human being. You
must therefore weigh as heavily as possible on your torturer’s body so that his
wits, which have wandered off somewhere, can at last be restored to their human
dimension.’ In this way ‘man both demands and claims his infinite humanity’.
There are always ‘tears to be wiped away, inhuman attitudes to be fought,
condescending ways of speech to be ruled out, men to be humanised’. Revolution,
for Fanon, was not simply about the transfer of power from one segment of
society to another. It entailed the reconstruction of humanity – in Fanon’s
case a distinctive post-colonial humanity – and a radical shift in the meaning
attached to being human. ‘Decolonisation is truly the creation of new men. But
such a creation cannot be attributed to a supernatural power. The “thing”
colonised becomes a man through the very process of liberation.’ It was
therefore inevitable in a colonial situation, Fanon argued, that the struggle
for liberation would have to be constituted in nationalist terms. But ‘if
nationalism is not explained, enriched, deepened, if it does not very quickly
turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism, then it leads to
a dead end’.[7]
Fanon, of course, shocks many liberal humanists with his
embrace of a necessary violence and his rejection of compromise. How, he asks,
is non-violence possible in a situation structured by the systematic violence
exercised by the colonisers? What is the point of starving people going on
hunger strike? Why, as Herbert Marcuse asked, should we be persuaded of the
virtues of tolerance towards the intolerable? In a divided world, where the
colonial power defines the colonised as subhuman and evil by nature, compromise
is impossible. ‘One does not negotiate with evil,’ famously said Vice-President
Dick Cheney. To which Fanon had a ready-made reply: ‘The work of the colonist
is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the colonised. The work of the
colonised is to imagine every possible method for annihilating the colonist …
The theory of the “absolute evil of the colonist” is in response to the theory
of the “absolute evil of the native”.’ In such a divided world there is no
prospect of negotiation or compromise. This is what has kept the USA and Iran
so far apart ever since the Iranian Revolution. ‘The native sector’ of the
colonial city, Fanon points out, ‘is not complementary to the European sector …
The city as a whole is governed by a purely Aristotelian logic’ and follows the
‘dictates of mutual exclusion’. Lacking a dialectical relation between the two,
the only way to break down the difference is through violence. ‘To destroy the
colonial world means nothing less than demolishing the colonist’s sector,
burying it deep within the earth or banishing it from the territory.’[8] There
is nothing mushy about such a programme. As Fanon saw clearly:
For the colonised this violence is invested with positive
formative features because it constitutes their only work. This violent praxis
is totalising since each individual represents a violent link in a great chain,
in the almighty body of violence rearing up in reaction to the primary violence
of the coloniser … at the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It
rids the colonised of their inferiority complex, of their passive and
despairing attitude. It emboldens them and restores their self-confidence. Even
if the armed struggle has been symbolic, and even if they have been demobilised
by rapid decolonisation, the people have time to realise their liberation was
the achievement of each and every one …[9]
But what is so stunning about The Wretched of the Earth, and
what indeed brings tears to the eyes on a close reading and makes it so
searingly human, is the second half of the book, which is taken up by
devastating descriptions of the psychic traumas of those on both sides who
found themselves forced by circumstances to participate in the violence of the
liberation struggle. We now know much more about the psychic damage suffered by
those US and other soldiers who engaged in military action in Vietnam,
Afghanistan and Iraq, and the terrible scourge on their lives as a result of
post-traumatic stress disorder. This is what Fanon wrote about with such
compassion in the midst of the revolutionary struggle against the colonial
system in Algeria. After decolonisation there is an immense work that remains
to be done, not only to repair the psyches of damaged souls, but also to
mitigate what Fanon clearly saw as the dangers of the lingering effects (even
replication) of colonial ways of thought and being. ‘The colonised subject
fights in order to put an end to domination. But he must also ensure that all
the untruths planted within him by the oppressor are eliminated. In a colonial
regime such as the one in Algeria the ideas taught by colonialism impacted not
only the European minority but also the Algerian. Total liberation involves
every facet of the personality … independence is not a magic ritual but an
indispensable condition for men and women to live in true liberation, in other
words to master all the material resources necessary for a radical transformation
of society.’[10]
I do not raise the question of violence here, any more than
did Fanon, because I am or he was in favour of it. He highlighted it because
the logic of human situations so often deteriorates to a point where there is
no other option. Even Gandhi acknowledged that. But the option has potentially
dangerous consequences. Revolutionary humanism has to offer some kind of
philosophical answer to this difficulty, some solace in the face of incipient
tragedies. While the ultimate humanist task may be, as Aeschylus put it 2,500
years ago, ‘to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this
world’, this cannot be done without confronting and dealing with the immense
violence that underpins the colonial and neocolonial order. This is what Mao
and Ho Chi Minh had to confront, what Che Guevara sought to achieve, and what a
host of political leaders and thinkers in post-colonial struggles, including
Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah of
Ghana, and Aimé Césaire, Walter Eodney, C.L.R. James and many others, have
acted against with such conviction in both words and deeds.
But is the social order of capital any different in essence
from its colonial manifestations? That order has certainly sought to distance
itself at home from the callous calculus of colonial violence (depicting it as
something that must necessarily be visited on uncivilised others ‘over there’
for their own good). It had to disguise at home the far too blatant inhumanity
it demonstrated abroad. ‘Over there’ things could be put out of sight and
hearing. Only now, for example, is the vicious violence of the British
suppression of the Mau Mau movement in Kenya in the 1960s being acknowledged in
full. When capital drifts close to such inhumanity at home it typically elicits
a similar response to that of the colonised. To the degree that it embraced
racialised violence at home, as it did in the United States, it produced
movements like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam along with leaders
like Malcolm X and, in his final days, Martin Luther King, who saw the
connectivity between race and class and suffered the consequences thereof. But
capital learned a lesson. The more race and class get woven seamlessly
together, then the faster the fuse for revolution burns. But what Marx makes so
clear in Capital is the daily violence constituted in the domination of capital
over labour in the marketplace and in the act of production as well as on the
terrain of daily life. How easy it is to take descriptions of contemporary
labour conditions in, for example, the electronics factories of Shenzhen, the
clothing factories of Bangladesh or the sweatshops of Los Angeles and insert
them into Marx’s classic chapter on ‘the working day’ in Capital and not notice
the difference. How shockingly easy it is to take the living conditions of the
working classes, the marginalised and the unemployed in Lisbon, São Paulo and
Jakarta and put them next to Engels’s classic 1844 description of The Condition
of the Working Class in England and find little substantive difference.[11]
Oligarchic capitalist class privilege and power are taking
the world in a similar direction almost everywhere. Political power backed by
intensifying surveillance, policing and militarised violence is being used to
attack the well-being of whole populations deemed expendable and disposable. We
are daily witnessing the systematic dehumanisation of disposable people.
Ruthless oligarchic power is now being exercised through a totalitarian democracy
directed to immediately disrupt, fragment and suppress any coherent anti-wealth
political movement (such as Occupy). The arrogance and disdain with which the
affluent now view those less fortunate than themselves, even when (particularly
when) vying with each other behind closed doors to prove who can be the most
charitable of them all, are notable facts of our present condition. The
‘empathy gap’ between the oligarchy and the rest is immense and increasing. The
oligarchs mistake superior income for superior human worth and their economic
success as evidence of their superior knowledge of the world (rather than their
superior command over accounting tricks and legal niceties). They do not know
how to listen to the plight of the world because they cannot and wilfully will
not confront their role in the construction of that plight. They do not and
cannot see their own contradictions. The billionaire Koch brothers give
charitably to a university like MiT even to the point of building a beautiful
day-care centre for the deserving faculty there while simultaneously lavishing
untold millions in financial support for a political movement (headed by the
Tea Party faction) in the US Congress that cuts food stamps and denies welfare,
nutritional supplements and day care for millions living in or close to
absolute poverty.
It is in a political climate such as this that the violent
and unpredictable eruptions that are occurring all around the world on an
episodic basis (from Turkey and Egypt to Brazil and Sweden in 2013 alone) look
more and more like the prior tremors for a coming earthquake that will make the
post-colonial revolutionary struggles of the 1960s look like child’s play. If
there is an end to capital, then this is surely from where it will come and its
immediate consequences are unlikely to prove happy for anyone. This is what
Fanon so clearly teaches.
The only hope is that the mass of humanity will see the
danger before the rot goes too far and the human and environmental damage
becomes too great to repair. In the face of what Pope Francis rightly dubs ‘the
globalisation of indifference’, the global masses must, as Fanon so neatly puts
it, ‘first decide to wake up, put on their thinking caps and stop playing the
irresponsible game of Sleeping Beauty’.[12] If Sleeping Beauty awakes in time,
then we might be in for a more fairytale-like ending. The ‘absolute humanism of
human history,’ wrote Gramsci, ‘does not aim at the peaceful resolution of
existing contradictions in history and society but rather is the very theory of
these contradictions’. Hope is latent in them, said Bertolt Brecht. There are,
as we have seen, enough compelling contradictions within capital’s domain to
foster many grounds for hope.
IDEAS FOR POLITICAL PRAXIS
What does this X-ray into the contradictions of capital tell
us about anti-capitalist political praxis? It cannot, of course, tell us
exactly what to do in the midst of fierce and always complicated struggles on
this or that issue on the ground. But it does help frame an overall direction
to anti-capitalist struggle even as it makes and strengthens the case for
anti-capitalist politics. When pollsters ask their favourite question, ‘Do you
think the country is headed in the right direction?’ that presumes that people
have some sense as to what the right direction might be. So what do those of us
who believe capital is headed in the wrong direction consider a right direction
and how might we evaluate our progress towards realising those goals? And how
might we present those goals as modest and sensible proposals – for such they
really are, relative to the absurd arguments put forward to deepen the powers
of capital as an answer to humanity’s crying needs? Here are some mandates –
derived from the seventeen contradictions – to frame and hopefully animate
political praxis. We should strive for a world in which:
The direct provision of adequate use values for all
(housing, education, food security etc.) takes precedence over their provision
through a profit-maximising market system that concentrates exchange values in
a few private hands and allocates goods on the basis of ability to pay.
A means of exchange is created that facilitates the
circulation of goods and services but limits or excludes the capacity of
private individuals to accumulate money as a form of social power.
The opposition between private property and state power is
displaced as far as possible by common rights regimes – with particular
emphasis upon human knowledge and the land as the most crucial commons we have
– the creation, management and protection of which lie in the hands of popular
assemblies and associations.
The appropriation of social power by private persons is not
only inhibited by economic and social barriers but becomes universally frowned
upon as a pathological deviancy.
The class opposition between capital and labour is dissolved
into associated producers freely deciding on what, how and when they will
produce in collaboration with other associations regarding the fulfilment of
common social needs.
Daily life is slowed down – locomotion shall be leisurely
and slow – to maximise time for free activities conducted in a stable and
well-maintained environment protected from dramatic episodes of creative
destruction.
Associated populations assess and communicate their mutual
social needs to each other to furnish the basis for their production decisions
(in the short run, realisation considerations dominate production decisions).
New technologies and organisational forms are created that
lighten the load of all forms of social labour, dissolve unnecessary
distinctions in technical divisions of labour, liberate time for free
individual and collective activities, and diminish the ecological footprint of
human activities.
Technical divisions of labour are reduced through the use of
automation, robotisation and artificial intelligence. Those residual technical
divisions of labour deemed essential are dissociated from social divisions of
labour as far as possible. administrative, leadership and policing functions
should be rotated among individuals within the population at large. We are
liberated from the rule of experts.
Monopoly and centralised power over the use of the means of
production is vested in popular associations through which the decentralised
competitive capacities of individuals and social groups are mobilised to
produce differentiations in technical, social, cultural and lifestyle
innovations.
The greatest possible diversification exists in ways of
living and being, of social relations and relations to nature, and of cultural
habits and beliefs within territorial associations, communes and collectives.
Free and uninhibited but orderly geographical movement of individuals within
territories and between communes is guaranteed. Representatives of the
associations regularly come together to assess, plan and undertake common tasks
and deal with common problems at different scales: bioregional, continental and
global.
All inequalities in material provision are abolished other
than those entailed in the principle of from each according to his, her or
their capacities and to each according to his, her, or their needs.
The distinction between necessary labour done for distant
others and work undertaken in the reproduction of self, household and commune
is gradually erased such that social labour becomes embedded in household and
communal work and household and communal work becomes the primary form of unalienated
and non-monetised social labour.
Everyone should have equal entitlements to education, health
care, housing, food security, basic goods and open access to transportation to
ensure the material basis for freedom from want and for freedom of action and
movement.
The economy converges on zero growth (though with room for
uneven geographical developments) in a world in which the greatest possible
development of both individual and collective human capacities and powers and
the perpetual search for novelty prevail as social norms to displace the mania
for perpetual compound growth.
The appropriation and production of natural forces for human
needs should proceed apace but with the maximum regard for the protection of
ecosystems, maximum attention paid to the recycling of nutrients, energy and
physical matter to the sites from whence they came, and an overwhelming sense
of re-enchantment with the beauty of the natural world, of which we are a part
and to which we can and do contribute through our works.
Unalienated human beings and unalienated creative personas
emerge armed with a new and confident sense of self and collective being. Born
out of the experience of freely contracted intimate social relations and
empathy for different modes of living and producing, a world will emerge where
everyone is considered equally worthy of dignity and respect, even as conflict
rages over the appropriate definition of the good life. This social world will
continuously evolve through permanent and ongoing revolutions in human
capacities and powers. The perpetual search for novelty continues.
None of these mandates, it goes without saying, transcends
or supersedes the importance of waging war against all other forms of
discrimination, oppression and violent repression within capitalism as a whole.
By the same token, none of these other struggles should transcend or supersede
that against capital and its contradictions. Alliances of interests are clearly
needed.
***
[1] David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City
to the Urban Revolution, London, Verso, 2013, p. 4.
[2] Peter Buffett, ‘The Charitable-Industrial Complex’, New
York Times, 26 July 2013.
[3] Catherine MacKinnon, Are Women Human?: And Other
International Dialogues, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2007.
[4] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, Chicago, Chicago
University Press, 2005.
[5] John Mackey, Rajendra Sisodia and Bill George, Conscious
Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business, Cambridge, MA, Harvard
Business Review Press, 2013.
[6] Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other
Writings, London, Verso, 2003; Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy,
Hegemony and Marxism, Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2010.
[7] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, New York, Grove
Press, 2005, p. 144.
[8] Ibid., p. 6.
[9] Ibid., p. 51.
[10] Ibid., p. 144.
[11] Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in
England, London, Cambridge University Press, 1962.
[12] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, p. 62.
This is an excerpt — the last two chapters — from Seventeen
Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey, out now from Profile
Books. David Harvey the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography
at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and Guggenheim
Fellowship recipient. He has authored such books as The Condition of
Postmodernity (1989), A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), and A Companion
to Marx’s Capital (2010). An interview with Harvey was featured on our website
in 2012.
