“We have to call off this capitalist urbanization dynamic” – An Interview with David Harvey
What we’ve got right now are some of these totally absurd forms of urbanization, for example in states like Dubai…the only thing that has kept global capitalism alive over the last years is the urbanization of China. If there had not been this huge urbanization project in China and if it had not been accelerated in the way it was after 2007/08, most of Latin America would have been in crisis throughout this whole period.
So I think the politics of daily life should be central to what we are doing. This doesn’t exclude the examination of labour processes and all the rest of it, but it seems to me that the Marxist tradition has been far too much focused on production and not on the dynamics of realization. Because value is being realized right now through urbanization, and the people who realize it are not necessarily those who produce it. There is a lot of rent extraction going on in cities by people who haven’t produced anything.
[Read interview at the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation website]
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