David Harvey on the post-capitalist imagination

Excerpted from an interview with Red Pepper magazine (conducted by Ronan Burtenshaw and Aubrey Robinson):

“RP: You have said often recently that one of the things we should be doing on the left is engaging our postcapitalist imagination, starting to ask the question of what a postcapitalist world would look like. Why is that so important? And, in your view, what would a postcapitalist world look like?

David Harvey:

It is important because it has been drummed into our heads for a considerable period of time that there is no alternative. One of the first things we have to do is to think about the alternative in order to move towards its creation.

The left has become so complicitous with neoliberalism that you can’t really tell its political parties from right-wing ones except on national or social issues. In political economy there is not much difference. We’ve got to find an alternative political economy to how capitalism works, and there are some principles. That’s why contradictions are interesting. You look at each one of them like, for instance, the use and exchange value contradiction and say – ‘the alternative world would be one where we deliver use values’. So we concentrate on use values and try to diminish the role of exchange values.

Or on the monetary question – we need money to circulate commodities, no question about it. But the problem with money is that it can be appropriated by private persons. It becomes a form of personal power and then a fetish desire. People mobilise their lives around searching for this money even when nobody knows that it is. So we’ve got to change the monetary system – either tax away any surpluses people are beginning to get or come up with a monetary system which dissolves and cannot be stored, like air miles.

But in order to do that you’ve also got to overcome the private property-state dichotomy and come to a common property regime. And, at a certain point, you need to generate a basic income for people because if you have a form of money that is anti-saving then you need to guarantee people. You need to say, ‘you don’t need to save for a rainy day because you’ll always be getting this basic income no matter what’. You’ve got to give people security that way rather than private, personal savings.

By changing each one of these contradictory things you end up with a different kind of society, which is much more rational than the one we’ve got. What happens right now is that we produce things and then we try to persuade consumers to consume whatever we’ve produced, whether they really want it or need it. Whereas we should be finding out what people’s basic wants and desires are and then mobilising the production system to produce that. By eliminating the exchange value dynamic you can reorganise the whole system in a different kind of way. We can imagine the direction that a socialist alternative would move in as it breaks from this dominant form of capital accumulation, which runs everything today. “

4 Comments David Harvey on the post-capitalist imagination

  1. AvatarMike riddell

    For such a system to work we need a new kind of marketplace that is able match underused resources with unmet needs.

    Such a marketplace would require better information than the one we have now. Prices are a form of information but don’t value the things that we as humans deem valuable.

    Once the things of value can be properly accounted for and converted into a means of exchange (a new kind of money) then we will all be able to see the world as one trading community where needs and wants and surplus capacity or waste can be valued, liquidated and posted for sale using this new kind of money.

    such a currency would be backed by the community’s time and credit (willingness to accept it as settlement of a debt owed).

    In short, what we need is a new kind of money and a new payments system that enables community members to trade with it.

  2. AvatarBob Haugen

    Mike,

    I love and agree with everything you wrote down to “converted into a means of exchange (a new kind of money)”.

    Is that actually necessary? Or can we “match underused resources with unmet needs” in other ways?

    Or to put it another way, is commodity exchange necessary?

  3. AvatarMike riddell

    Hi Bob

    In order to be able to match underused resources with unmet needs we need a ‘unit of account’ to value the worth of the resources in question, and a means of exchanging this value so that it can be traded for something else of value.

    I don’t know how else we can match the underused resources with unmet needs without resorting to barter but of course that relies on me having what you want, and you having what i want.

    The exchange of goods and services for other goods and services underpins our market-based economy. We don’t want state socialism, and we don’t want corporate capitalism – what we want is something in between.

  4. AvatarBob Haugen

    Mike,

    Lots of unmet needs will never be met in our lovely market economy because they don’t have any money attached.

    E.g. good health care and child development resources for poor people.

    Clean water.

    I could go on.

    Lots of ways to manage all that without direct barter.

    I do expect money to persist for quite awhile, but it is certainly possible to imagine alternatives. Time banks, for example, exist today. And I don’t think that is the only possible alternative.

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