Cities By the People, Cities For the People

[marmar]

from On The Commons.org:



Cities By the People, Cities For the People
A conversation with David Harvey, eminent geographer, commoner, radical and champion of our right to the city

September 8, 2012 | by Chris Carlsson



......(snip)......

Chris Carlsson: Who did you write Rebel Cities for?

David Harvey: My aim was to write a book for everyone who has serious questions about the qualities of the urban life to which they are exposed and the limited choices that arise, given the way in which political and economic power asserts a hegemonic right to build cities according to its own desires and needs (for profit and capital accumulation) rather than to satisfy the needs of people.

In so doing, I wanted to provide indications of the kind of theoretical framework to which I appeal and I, therefore, use seemingly abstract (often, but not exclusively, Marxist) concepts. But my aim is to use these concepts in such a way that anybody can grasp them. (I don’t always succeed, of course.) I then hope that people might become interested to seek a deeper knowledge of the sort of framework that I use. For example, in “The Art of Rent,” I use a seemingly arcane concept of monopoly rent, but I hope by the end of the chapter people can understand very well what it might mean and wonder how it is that a society that lauds competition as foundational to its functioning is populated by capitalists who will go to great lengths to secure monopoly power by any means and how they capture unearned rents by resorting to that power.

......(snip)......

You write: “The chaotic processes of capitalist creative destruction have evidently reduced the collective left to a state of energetic but fragmented incoherence, even as periodic eruptions of mass movements of protest … suggest that the objective conditions for a more radical break with the capitalist law of value are more than ripe for the taking.”

For many people, targeting the “capitalist law of value” is terribly abstract. Can you rephrase that in terms that people can see and feel in their everyday lives?

I could substitute the phrase “capitalist law of value” with the phrase “the maximization of profit in a context of global competition” and then point to the devastating history of deindustrialization (more destruction than creation) from the 1980s across city after city, not only in North America, but also Europe and elsewhere (e.g. Mumbai and Northern China).

But I wanted to use the term “value” very explicitly to raise the question of what it is that capital values and how radically that contrasts with other ways of thinking about the values that might prevail in another kind of society. The capitalist law of value is what animates the activities of Bain Capital, etc. and we have to see that value system as profoundly opposed to human emancipation and well-being, that there is a distinctive “law of value” that capital internalizes and imposes that overrides all other values that stand in its path. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://onthecommons.org/magazine/cities-people-cities-people

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[niyad]

2. k andr and bookmarked for later

[HiPointDem]

3. kr. i also recommend harvey's lectures on the right to the city & neoliberalism if you want

a pocket history of the neoliberal pushback following the 60s & how things like, e.g. the 1975 new york city 'bankruptcy' and takeover prefigure our present situation.

it's a continuous thread from then to now.

[limpyhobbler]

4. +1

This one was on topic. Kind of dry maybe.

[Fantastic Anarchist]

5. Proudhon's "What is Property?" and

Benjamin Tucker's "The Four Monopolies" should be read, as well.