DAVID HARVEY 

(...) The first point I want to make is that an interesting dialogue is being set up, between this processes called globalization, which assumes very much in consciousness and in representation as if it’s something ethereal, something that’s so far up there that somehow or other none of us can deal with it.  Globalization is operating on us. Governments can’t control it.  Nobody can. There’s something called globalization that’s going on.  It’s sort of, it has this ethereal quality to it.  That ethereal quality then connects to, as it were, the opposite end of the scale of things, which is the notion of the individual and the personal.  And it sometimes seems like dialogue and discussion gets segregated into this discussion of globalization which is way up there and then personal life, personal well-being, the person as it were, the other end down here.  And somehow there’s no connectivity between those two levels.  One of the things I tried to do in my last book is to say what is the connectivity between those two discourses of globalization and for example the body or the person or the individual.  What is the connection between the two? 

And of course, if you think of the labor process, immediately you see what the connection is, that the body of the worker in an IKEA plant in Indonesia is being used in a certain kind of way for certain kinds of purposes, which connect to the first. So there’s all sorts of connections that exist. But there is also an interesting progressive connection. I want to play on the duality here. A progressive connection. There has been a tremendous resurgence in the last few years of interesting questions of let’s say human rights, which is about the rights of individuals and the body in relationship to these global processes.  And at that point you kind of start to see the connectivity.  And then you start to see it at other levels like some of the international conferences on population and women, talking about, you know, what’s the reproductive rights of women and what has that got to do, as it were, with the global processes of population transformation. So, as it were, there are points of dialogue between those two levels, and I want to come back to that a little later.

The next point I want to make is that actually if you start to unpack what globalization is about, it doesn’t exist to some ethereal aspect up there. It actually is occurring at all kinds of different levels and all kinds of different scales. And I think we’d have to start to look at the different scales at which the globalization process is operating in order to get a better grasp on how to politically intervene in relationship to it. Because one of the things I’ve been very antagonistic to over the last few years is the sense of helplessness that you can’t intervene, you can’t do anything. The best you can do is do something in your own back yard. Take care of your own property and it enhances value or something like that. And you can’t do anything much else, you know. And that came over in this famous Margaret Thatcher phrase, which I’m thoroughly at war with, which is the notion that there is no alternative. And to say well maybe we should be thinking alternatives. And then the issue arises where can we think alternatives?  How can we think alternatives?  And it’s very hard to think alternatives if you just think about globalization as some ethereal set of processes that nobody’s in control of.  But you can start to think alternatives when you start to unpack it.  

The globalization also has effects at other levels at for example, the community level.  David Avalos just talked a little bit about this.  I think it’s very important to recognize that what’s happening in say San Diego, what’s happening in Baltimore, is not just something which is just our own back yard politics.  It is connected in very important ways to what this globalization process is about.  And by acting at that level, you can actually engage in transformative work, which has possibilities when taken towards other levels to do something quite different about the political situation.  

Many people have given up on the Nation State.  They say the nation state is powerless.  Well, you know, having crossed that border down there twice in the last couple of days, the idea of the nation’s state is powerless? This is crazy.  And also at that level there is something crucial.  Nation States are not powerless.  Nation states are terribly important containers of power with a possibility of engaging with this process in quite different ways.  And if you start to look at the ways in which different nation states have responded to globalization, have affected globalization, then you can kind of say national state policy is actual a very important terrain of intervention.  There are regional configurations, which are below the nation state and some instances above the nation state, regional configurations which are rather important to consider.

And then there are the multinational or transnational institutes that’s like the European Union, like NAFTA, which are also important in the way in which this process is being worked out.  And then there are the global institutions, the INF, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and all those things that have been the target of a lot of radical attention in the last few years through Seattle, Washington, Prague, Melbourne and the like.  So when you start to think about it you see there are all these layers of activities that occur at different scales.  And one of the questions we need to look at is what is the relationship between say what is happening here in San Diego at the community level, the very local community level, at the metropolitan level and what that relationship is also to the kind of regional consciousness that might be emerging across border.  What is that all about and how does that relate as it were to processes of globalization.  There have been many transformative things occurring in the last few years.  Just to give you one example that struck me quite catastrophically yesterday when looking at that, you know, Operation Gatekeeper and the wall.

I mean, I kept on thinking back to the tremendous euphoria attached to the attack on the Berlin wall, when people took sledge hammers and smashed the whole thing down.  And frankly my response to that, the balloon event, was I wanted to take a sledgehammer to that damn wall.  And then thinking, but why is that wall some how rather regarded legitimate?  Why are we putting walls up in some parts of the world and tearing them down elsewhere?  Why are people going behind gated communities, living in gated communities and putting walls all over the place?  At the same time, we’ve got globalization going on.  What’s going on?  What’s the relationship between these two?  And I want to argue that the relationships are not contingent or accidental.  There is a structural transformation going on in the ways in which life is being worked out geographically through globalization.

Now, what kinds of responses can we have to these two processes of globalization and technological change?  It seems to me there are some fundamental questions that might be asked.

And some of these issues are being discussed in things like issues about human rights in general, the interests of collective rights, the whole kinds of questions of cultural relativism, misuse of those sorts.  So there is, there’s a whole a series of sites, if you want to call it that, of discussion of thinking and of feeling.  And I think feeling is probably more important than thinking.  Feeling that there is something, which is catastrophically wrong.  There is something that is really out of whack.  We seem to be headed in the wrong direction.  We’re on the wrong train.  We need to get off it. We need to create another one.  How can we do it?  And if you ask yourself the question, where is the opposition to this whole system we’re talking about occurring?  The answer is it’s all over the place.  I find it in my own city in terms of living wage movements and discontent and alienation in many marginalized communities.  I find it in many other places, you know the peasant movements in India or movements in rural Brazil.  I mean, you name it, there’s sort of movements all over the place, which are oppositional movements.  All of them expressing the view that something is wrong, that something’s got to be done.  And it can sometimes take specific issues about you know the environment or cultural autonomy or personal liberties and freedoms and all those sorts of things.  But there’s something wrong.

And then we have to start to talk about well why is this thing that’s wrong so wrong?  My answer is a very simple one.  It’s because we’ve given up before the powers of capital accumulation and money.  It’s as simple as that.  We lie down in front of it all.  Which is not to say everybody who wields that power is an evil, nasty kind of person, but to say basically look, that’s where the power lies.  And we seem not to be able to mobilize ourselves against it.  Look at the elections and look at what David Avalos was talking about.  So how do we start to configure a conversation about alternatives?  And that conversation has to address what for me is really the fundamental kind of issue about who are we and what do we want to become?  What kind of world do we want to live in?  And if capital can’t give us that world, then we should find some way to get rid of capital and construct something completely different.  And that’s a revolutionary solution.  It’s a terrible place to say that right here, right?  There are possibilities it seems to me that the social democratic possibility would be to control it in some way.  Turn it into a servant rather than a master.  Control it, and see if it can be used.  And actually right now, of course, we’re getting all these institutions which are precisely about regulation and control.  We have sort of the questions of financial instability, how can that be regulated and controlled?  We have questions of the environment.  How can that be regulated and controlled?  We have sort of social and political questions.  How can that be regulated and controlled?  So actually right now there’s a whole kind of almost coming back of a notion of there’s going to be some global regulatory apparatus.  And along with that sort of issue, which is sort of seen as a technical sort of managerial kind of problem comes another problem, which is what kinds of values are going to be incorporated in those institutions, which is what the struggle in Seattle in many ways was about.  What kinds of values should be incorporated in the WTO or in the IMF if you can put any values in them whatsoever other than the purely monetary ones?  So those are the issues that then come back, these sort of moral issues.

Where can these things be discussed?  Will they be discussed within the formal structure of university education?  I don’t see it.  I really don’t see it.  I try to discuss it but frankly, you know, I get pretty much marginalized in my own institution which is one of the reasons I’m leaving Hopkins because it’s all about selling itself to technological change and the state apparatus.  It’s all about that.  It’s all about gaining money.  I don’t own enough research grants.  I’m a non-valued person in my institution.  And they make clear you’re non-valued.  And they treat you that way.  You’re a parasite because you’re not making, you’re not giving yourself over to government and industry.  They have a mission statement.  The first draft of which said, “We have to give ourselves over to serving government and industry.”  When I got up and said, “Well what about the public interest?  What about poor?”  People kind of said, “Oh, yeah, well, oh yeah. Maybe we should modify the statement.”  But they’re not going to modify the practice.  So it might occur not there.  Would it occur through I don’t know museums and so on?  I don’t know much about museums and so on.  

And it seems to me that organizations like inSITE have a real possibility.  And it’s a possibility, not necessarily a realization and we might want to discuss that.  Of exploring some of the contradictions would exist within this process particularly between the levels, between the way in which the personal is political for many artists and that.  And the way in which that relates to something called community, which maybe relates to the question of regional consciousness across border.  Are there sort of contradictory elements there that can be actually played upon?  And how can those contradictory elements be played upon?  I think this is for me the sort of question which arise is inSITE a site where these kinds of issues can be discussed and brought to the floor and how can they be brought to the floor?  That is as I say, the major issue from my standpoint.  So there are then these two fundamental questions that I would want to look at.  And in looking at them I think it’s not that we can look at them and say, “Well I have all the answers or you know this is what we should do and this is how we should do it.”  But it is a moment where I think we need conversations, conversations about alternatives, conversations about where we are.  Where we’re going with all this stuff, how to understand it perhaps?  And having understood it a bit better, put ourselves in a position to intervene in those contradictions in some sort of conscious political way through the formation of alliances, through the configuration of linking together, activities at one scale with another scale.  You know there’s a tendency for people who work with community action to say the only place that matters is community action because people that work at the state say it’s at the state that matters.  People that work at the global institution say the global institutions matter.  They all matter.  And if we can find ways to talk across those different scales of political action, I think we’ll be in a much better position to confront some of the dynamics of technological change and globalization.

Extractos de la participación de Harvey en la Conversación I:  La Universidad y el Museo en la Economía Global. 15 de octubre, 2000. In(fo)SITE, San Diego. 

Davis Harvey es Profesor de Geografía en la Universidad John Hopkins, en Baltimore.