Nice day for a revolution: Why May Day should be a date
to stand up and change the system

By David Harvey

Friday, 29 April
2011http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/nice-day-for-a-revolution-why-may-day-should-be-a-date-to-stand-up-and-change-the-system-2276274.html


May Day is the occasion we celebrate the grand
achievements of the workers of the world in making our
world a far, far better place to live in. There is,
unfortunately, not too much to celebrate these days.
The past 30 years are littered with battles and
skirmishes that have resulted in defeat after defeat
for organised labour.

A capitalist class gone rampant has now consolidated
its power to command or corrupt almost all the major
institutions that regulate the body politic - the
political parties (of both left and right), the media,
the universities, the law, to say nothing of the
repressive state apparatus and international
institutions. The democracy of money power now rules. A
global plutocracy exerts its will almost everywhere
unchallenged.

So what is there to celebrate? We would not, of course,
have what we still have now (from pensions to the
remnants of reasonable health care and public
education) had it not been for the labour movement. But
waxing nostalgic over the undoubted achievements and
heroism of the past will get us nowhere.

May Day should therefore be about relaunching a
revolutionary movement to change the world. The very
thought of doing that - even just saying it and writing
it down - is as exhilarating as it is astonishing.

But is this, too, a relic of revolutionary rhetoric
from some bygone era? Or are we at one of those curious
points in human history when the only reasonable thing
to do is to demand the impossible? The simultaneous
stirrings of revolt from Cairo and Damascus to
Wisconsin and the streets of London, from Athens to
Lima, from the murderous factories in China's Pearl
River Delta to the factory occupations in Argentina,
from the revival of rural rebellions in India to the
movements of shanty-town dwellers in South Africa,
suggests something different is in the air. An
unstoppable movement of global revolt, perhaps, that
says: enough is enough! It is our turn, the
dispossessed and deprived of the earth, to want and get
more.

Alongside all the simmering protests, innumerable
practical alternatives to endless capital accumulation
are being explored - co-operative movements, solidarity
economies and networks, food security organisations,
environmental and peasant movements, worker-controlled
collectives are all in motion. A decentralised but
substantial movement of people across the world already
exists, seeking satisfying and humane ways to reproduce
an adequate social life.

This sprawling and often chaotic movement bids fair to
take on the role that organised labour once played.
Animated by autonomist and alternative lifestyle
thinking and with marked preference for locally-based
and networked organisational forms, these movements,
often backed by a powerful but insidious NGO culture,
have trouble combining and scaling up to translate
their often fecund local schemes into a global strategy
to deliver an adequate and healthy social life to the
6.8 billion people now on Planet Earth.

Where we can go depends, of course, very much on where
we are now. So what are the revolutionary possibilities
- and even more importantly, the revolutionary
necessities - of our time?

We are, I believe, at an inflection point in the
history of capitalism. The compound rates of growth
that have prevailed over the past two centuries are
increasingly difficult to sustain. Is continuous
compound growth (at a minimum rate of 3 per cent a
year) in perpetuity possible in a world that is already
fully integrated into the capitalist dynamic? The
environmental and social consequences are bad enough
but the potentially deadly geo-economic and
geopolitical competition over markets, resources, land
and uses of the atmosphere is even scarier.

Zero growth is a necessity and zero growth is
incompatible with capitalism. The necessity is,
therefore, that we must all become anti-capitalists.
Alternative ways to survive and prosper must be found.
That is the imperative of our times. This is what we
should commit to on this May Day.

The crisis of 2007-9 and its aftermath constituted a
warning shot. That crisis, many say, constituted a
game-changer for how politics and the economy might
work. But nobody seems to have a clear idea of what the
new game might be about, what its rules might be, and
who might guide it in what direction.

The bankruptcy in creative ideas today contrasts
radically with earlier crises. In the 1930s, for
example, a major shift in economic thinking,
Keynesianism, underpinned a radical reorient- ation of
state apparatuses and policies in the core regions of
capitalism. It produced relatively strong and stable
economic growth from 1945 to 1968 or so, in North
America and Europe.

Ironically, these were years when the top marginal tax
rate in the United States was sometimes as high as 92
per cent and never less than 70 (thus giving the lie to
those who claim that high marginal tax rates on the
rich inhibit growth). These were also years when
organised labour did reasonably well in the advanced
capitalist countries.

While decolonisation throughout the rest of the world
proceeded apace, the spread and, in some cases,
imposition of economic development projects brought
much of the globe into a tense relation with capitalist
forms of development and underdevelopment (prompting a
wave of revolutionary movements in the late 1960s into
the 1970s, from Portugal to Mozambique). These
movements were resolutely resisted, undermined and
eventually rolled back through a combination of local
elite power supported by US covert actions, coups and
co-optations.

The crisis years of the 1970s forged another radical
paradigm shift in economic thinking: neoliberalism came
to town. There were frontal attacks on organised labour
accompanied by a savage politics of wage repression.
State involvement in the economy (particularly with
respect to welfare provision and labour law) were
radically rethought by Reagan and Thatcher. There were
huge concessions to big capital and the result was that
the rich got vastly richer and the poor relatively
poorer. But, interestingly, aggregate growth rates
remained low even as the consolidation of plutocratic
power proceeded apace.

An entirely different world then emerged, totally
hostile to organised labour and resting more and more
on precarious, temporary and dis- organised labour
spread-eagled across the earth. The proletariat became
increasingly feminine.

The crisis of 2007-9 sparked a brief global attempt to
stabilise the world's financial system using Keynesian
tools. But after that the world split into two camps:
one, based in North America and Europe, sees the crisis
as an opportunity to complete the end-game of a vicious
neoliberal project of class domination: the other
cultivates Keynesian nostalgia, as if the postwar
growth history of the United States can be repeated in
China and in other emerging markets.

The Chinese, blessed with huge foreign exchange
reserves, launched a vast stimulus programme building
infrastructures, whole new cities and productive
capacities to absorb labour and compensate for the
crash of export markets. The state-controlled banks
lent furiously to innumerable local projects. The
growth rate surged to above 10 per cent and millions
were put back to work. This was followed by a tepid
attempt to put in motion the other pinion of a
Keynesian programme: raising wages and social
expenditures to bolster the internal market.

China's growth has had spillover effects. Raw material
suppliers, such as Australia and Chile and much of the
rest of Latin America have resumed strong growth.

The problems that attach to such a Keynesian programme
are well-known. Asset bubbles, particularly in the
"hot" property market in China, are forming all over
the place and inflation is accelerating in classic
fashion to suggest a different kind of crisis may be
imminent. But also the environmental consequences are
generally acknowledged, even by the Chinese government,
to be disastrous, while labour and social unrest is
escalating.

China contrasts markedly with the politics of austerity
being visited upon the populations of North America and
Europe. The neoliberal formula established in the
Mexican debt crisis of 1982, is here being repeated.
When the US Treasury and the IMF bailed out Mexico in
order to pay off the New York investment banks they
mandated austerity. The standard of living in an
already poor country fell by nearly 25 per cent over
five or so years. By the end of the century Mexico had
more billionaires than Saudi Arabia and Carlos Slim was
soon to be declared the richest person in the world in
the midst of burgeoning poverty.

This is the fate, along with perpetually high rates of
unemployment and stagnant wages that awaits populations
in the West, unless there is sufficient political
resistance and popular unrest to reverse it. It is a
politics of dispossession, not only of assets but of
hard-won political and civil rights.

Behind this there lies a sinister history. When Ronald
Reagan assumed the Presidency in 1981, he drastically
reduced the marginal top tax rate from 72 to 32 per
cent while lavishing all manner of other tax advantages
on the corporations and the rich. He launched a huge
deficit-financed arms race with the Soviet Union. The
result was a rapid increase in the debt. David
Stockman, Reagan's budget director, then gave the game
away. The aim was to so run up the debt as to justify
gutting all the social programmes and environmental
regulations that had been imposed on capital in
preceding years.

When Bush Jnr came to power in 2001, his
Vice-President, Dick Cheney, repeatedly asserted that
"Reagan taught us that deficits do not matter". So Bush
cut taxes substantially on corporations and the rich.
He fought two unfunded wars (costing close to a
trillion dollars) and passed a costly drug prescription
law that favoured big pharma. A budget surplus under
Clinton was turned into a sea of red ink under Bush.
Now the Republicans and the Wall Street faction of the
Democrats demand the debt be retired at the expense of
social programmes and environmental regulations.

This is what plutocratic politics has been about these
past 30 years: raise the rate of exploitation on
labour, plunder the environment mercilessly and
collapse the social wage so the plutocrats can have it
all.

Yet the two greatest problems of our time, according to
the millennium goals signed by almost all countries in
the United Nations, are the potential for ecological
collapse and burgeoning social inequalities. But in the
United States there is a persistent movement to
exacerbate both problems. Why?

Capital throughout its history has long sought to evade
certain costs, to treat them as "externalities" as the
economists like to say. Environmental costs and the
costs of social reproduction (everything from who takes
care of grandmother and the disabled to child rearing)
are the two most important categories that capital
prefers to ignore. Two hundred years of political
struggle in the advanced capitalist world forced
corporations to internalise some of these costs either
through regulation and taxation or through the
organisation of private and public welfare systems.

The early 1970s was a high watermark in the advanced
capitalist world for environmental regulation (in the
USA the establishment of the Environmental Protection
Agency and the Occupational Safety & Health
Administration, for example) and state and corporate
welfare schemes (the welfare state structures of
Europe).

Since the 1970s, there has been a concerted effort on
the part of businesses to divest themselves of the
financial and political burdens of dealing with these
costs. This was what Reaganism was all about.
Simultaneously, the high mobility of capital
(encouraged by the deregulation of finance and capital
flows) permitted capital to move to parts of the world
(Asia in particular) where such costs had never been
internalised and where the regulatory environment was
minimalist.

Meanwhile, the preferred means for seeking solutions to
the key problems of environmental degradation and
global poverty - the liberalised markets, free trade
and rapid growth and capital accumulation favoured by
the IMF, the World Bank and leading politicians in the
most powerful countries - are precisely those which
produce such problems in the first place. The problem
of global poverty cannot be attacked without attacking
the global accumulation of wealth. Environmental issues
cannot be solved by a turn to green capitalism without
confronting the corporate interests and the lifestyles
that perpetuate the status quo.

If capital is forced to internalise all of these costs
then it will go out of business. That is the simple
truth. But this defines a convenient path towards an
alternative to capital. What we must demand on May Day
is that capital pay its social and environmental dues
and debts in full. Organised labour may lead the way.
But it needs allies from among the precarious workers
and the social movements. We might be surprised to find
that, united, we can make our own history after all.

David Harvey is a Distinguished Professor at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His
latest book is The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of
Capitalism is published by Profile Press 

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