[S6 E04] The Politics of Clans and Castes

David Harvey explores Marx's theory of the capitalist mode of production, emphasizing the importance of understanding both the inner structure and external dynamics of this system. Harvey highlights the contradiction inherent in commodities, where use value and exchange value often clash. He discusses how this contradiction, as outlined by Marx, shapes the entire mode of production. Harvey expands this into a broader discussion on the social formation, emphasizing the interplay between the capitalist mode of production and social factors like race and gender that result in organizational systems within society such as Castes and clans. He argues that a comprehensive understanding of the dynamics of everyday living requires considering both the internal structure of capitalism and the broader social context in which it operates.

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David Harvey's Anti-Capitalist Chronicles is co-produced by Politics in Motion. Politics In Motion is a nonprofit organization founded in May 2023 by Prof. David Harvey and Prof. Miguel Robles-Durán, along with Dr. Chris Caruso, instructional technologist, and noted writer and art curator Laura Raicovich. Our anti-capitalist media platform offers piercing insights and thought-provoking analyses on political, social, spatial, cultural, environmental and economic issues through a range of engaging mediums, including YouTube streams, podcasts, and live events. 

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David Harvey's lastest book "A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse" (Verso 2023):

https://www.versobooks.com/products/2930-a-companion-to-marx-s-grundrisse

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[Machine generated transcription]

Welcome back to Anticapitalist Chronicles. Had a fairly long break in the summer for a variety of reasons. Some of them were work-based, others in medication in particular health-based. I finally caught covid. We got a lot of things stemming from that. Pretty high concentrate, but we're now in a situation where we can start to put politics in motion back in as a part of the media fair, which I hope that we'll have a series of enlightening sessions in which this new session will actually take up some of the findings at our own work as that work unfolds, but also go back and start to consolidate some of the ideas that were coming out.

Now I don't do something in this session with Charlie. I'm very hesitant to do becauses in that way. That's like giving away from certain secrets. And see most of my work has been about actually trying to understand the capitalist mode of production and to do it with understanding Marx's theory of the capitalist mode of production. As he says in the vo, he say, you can't really understand bourgeois society without understanding what is capital and what is capital. It's not really about understanding your thing, it's about understanding the whole mode of conduction and its internal contradictions. So that I've been working a lot on question member, the inner structure if you like, of society which is built around the capitalist and which actually is then meant to be understood in terms of its dynamics through the contradictions within that capital mode. Dutch by contradictions, I should give the simplest one I can from page one of Marxist capital where he introduces the idea of a commodity, which is this a solid thing and then said that there are two aspects of the commodity.

It can be a use value and it can be an exchange value. But the thing was that there's a contradiction here, which is this, but if you want to make use of the commodity and you cannot sell it, if you ought to sell it, you cannot be using it. So there's the contradiction. So on page one, you have the contradiction and the implications of that contradiction are worked out by Marx, by the construction from this theory, the mode production. So I've been working on that in an urban kind of context and I think to me it has been very enlightening. We'll go back over some of the things that I found out on world and distinctive futu forces at work, creating urbanization affecting daily life and the light through the operations arm, the countless murder production. But at the same time, Marx I think made very clear and if he didn't make clear enough, I'm going to make it even clearer to say that the murder not the only thing that you should be concerned with.

If you're actually concerned with, understand the dynamics of daily life and the dynamics of so comfort change that we need to think about the relationship, the motor production and what Marks talks about as the social formation. And this is a very useful division. The mode of production man is something that working on and to sort thing and Marks spelled out in capital and she is a surplus value and the greel and all the rest of it. So the mode of production is one thing, but the social formation is if you like, the much, much broader totality in which we start to think about all of the different ways in which society organizes itself. We think about not only the inner structure of a cab mode, she worked with social structures and racing gender and power and the light. And so I thought it would be useful to sort of at least give you some sense of how I tend to utilize the notion of the mode deduction in relationship to what is going on in the social formation, which is a much broader historical idea.

And those two terms mode of production and social formation. Marx doesn't always make clear to which one he's working. Then I get to try and be clear about it. I sort of saying when I'm talking about a mode of production on human signal lessons, what I'm talking about and when I talk about the social formation, but then we will talk about anatomy, you will I think get some idea That's a clear difference to me. Now the way which I, I'm thinking about this, this is sort of in the back of my mind until this is the first time I've actually confessed it to what's been going on in the back of my mind, in the back of my mind. And the social formation is really a composite of effects which flow from three different sources. One is the mode of production, which is the notion of a class society in which the class conflict is basic to the dynamic and the reproduction capital and surplus value and all of that sort of thing is absolutely d. So the first form of is class society itself and that some, I've been talking about his talks in the past, but there's a matter of sea here and that is Clan Society.

Marx actually writes a lot about Klan society, but he writes about historically in clan society you you're talking about the way in which human populations gather together and on your basis of some kind of Fiji family or blah line or something like that tend to kind of create and form of association, which is about the clan. Mar was very interested in history of Klan societies and was particularly interested Germanic clans. And immediately something becomes apparent when you start to think about Klan society historically, which is that they was the clams. There is a certain basis for the way in which human beings aggregate connect activities and so on. And that basis initially Mark suggest dominated by family like line loyalty to particular base or particular house.

And then there was over time Mark suggests that the basis of become activity was increasingly territorialized. That is you're starting to have loyalty to the population in your particular place. And so you look at the history of conflicts of this kind and the sort of thing that Marx has in mind here. Say something like the Wars of the Roses as they were back before Henry and the War of the Roses was really about two families, the Lancaster family, the Yorkshire family and two families were vying for their rights to inhabit demon monarch beaten demon monarch. So there were 20 or 30 years of war between War of the Roses, between the Lancastrian house and to Lancaster and York on the other side. Some of the two eventually became territorialized between Yorkshire and Lancashire and these two houses buying for Power England and in particular buying as rightful to the crown.

So the wars of the Roses were I think a very good example of the sorts of things that planned societies going up do. Warfare was absolutely crucial in terms of what they were about. So the wars from low were very significant and it is interesting to this day when Yorkshire plays Lan K in cricket. It said, oh the War of the Roses all over ga. And so people have long-term memory of that distinction and of course it incurred in the industrial structure as well because Anca shields the preeminent area cotton production and therefore had all of these relationships cotton producers in south of the United States. And Yorkshire on the other hand was the S of the world towns. So for example, when the Civil war came up in the United States and supply the cotton was interrupted in close, but cotton industry was in serious economic difficulty because the black of access to cotton boy has Yorkshire towns and so it was Manchester against Leeds and so on.

So the Klan history is long there and as Marks points out and as recently also has been divided I think very much by this Japanese ecosocialist side though there's that one of the things that you can find in clan society is that there's a very close relationship between the kind of social order is create kind of social situation constructed. And this means that the whole question of the sustainability and ecological foundations for social economic activity, those things come into pick from in a way. So the existence of Klan society historically has been very significant. The Grand Mars spend quite a bit of time talking about the varieties of Klan structures historically and the importance of class structures in pounding a kind of world in which capital could eventually arrive into as far to Marxist Concernedly don't really conquer it, but we find that the conquering of the Klan society, sometimes some very negative effects, which is when capital ceased to be concerned about the land in the way that the common property, which was very popular amongst planned societies and the whole kind of notions of what the individual could or could not do, and also the basis of the social order.

Now with capital, the basis of the social order is of course value production, value creation and surplus value creation. But on the other hand, clan society is not about that. Clan society tends to be concerned with the loyalty, honor, trust and all the rest of it. The sorts of things were made a lot of in Woolies, some photo, maybe little reconstructions which we now see on Netflix and House Dragons and all those kinds of things. So this is a world, a different kind of world and the idea that somehow or other that world disappeared entirely is I think entirely erroneous. In fact, it stays with us and in particular of course it perhaps in terms of nationalism, in other words, the clan society kind of ethic if you want to call it that in many its features of clan society carry over into our own time and very much and turns out the idea of national identity and national identity often focusing on certain environmental populations so that the identity of the Irish is very much about associated with ness, pea bogs in of it the identity of the Welsh connecting to the mountains, the identity of the Germans to the Paris Sun and the like.

In the United States, the argument would be that the American characters very much be being associated the idea of wilderness and nce and wilderness and the steps taken to preserve wilderness in terms of national parks into that sort so that the national identity and environmental configurations are mixed up. And actually in some way people will very much type detect the base in national, the intern dominant logical configuration, which is the sustamine of the society. So that nationalism and the national identity is the predominant way in which the idea of clan starts to come part and parcel of the social order. Now I can't go to those areas and say, okay, I going to say abolish one of this and replace it with class identity. It's not class identity, it's a national identity. And of course we're still in the situation and say, okay, why is there a war between Ukraine and Russia?

Well, we talk about some of the economic aspects and happen on the other hand, you can't get to the heart of it without actually in bubble the idea of national identity and this notion Ukrainians national identity, which they're trying to observe against Russia to obliterate that Russian identity. So there is a struggle going on in the which is a very meaningful struggle which is not explained by a class analysis about which needs to be explained in terms of what I'll call kind of analysis of identity identity. Now you can then say, well okay, what's the relationship which goes on Ians two in social formation? We'll find many elements of cross obviously, but at the same time we're going to find elements clan identity coming very strong. And I think in this case the easiest thing to do is to say, well let's talk how this actually plays out in a particular economic formative way.

And the obvious example which we can use is the Olympics. Now what is the Olympics about? People are competing for excellence and they're doing it in the lane of their national identity that that is question is how many gold medals the Chinese get gold medals and the United States get French and there is a French contingent to the, and when the medals are awarded the national Hans Anthems at play. In other words, it's very difficult to imagine the Olympics going forward without some sort of notion of national identity and some sort motion competition between the nations. And it's a peaceful competition, mentioned some violent, occasionally it's a peaceful competition in which national identity intense precedence in which case you look at it and on the surface you would say, well this is a typical exemplar of client identity mid mitigated by the not of nation state.

And so we are actually taking this idea of a kind like that inside that it has a prominent thing to something prominent part to play in the way in which a particular situation, no. Then of course now what if you look at deeper immediately you say, well what are the class interests in the mounting of the Olympic games? Well, for a rather long time now developers in various cities have very much wanted Olympic games because in Lincoln games higher opportunity to really create urban investments of all kinds. And so soon you can get into a little bit into the economics what's going on and you find, well actually what we find in the Olympic Games is a merger of interests in which class identity class dynamic is absolutely critical in relationship to lead the client identity. So that is a situation where I cannot explain what is going on in Olympic games without invoking both of them.

And in fact what we find is that of course capital has a great deal of interest in sponsoring the Olympic games and in fact as sponsoring athletes and sponsoring our interest. Now notice something here which is the act again, while the issues that I raised before is to say, well what's the turnover time of consumption activities? And I kind of say, well I'm still using my grandmother's night and for so turnover time of those activities very, very long. But capital as marz points out lights, turnover times, which was close to zero as possible and the Olympics are a great example of that. In two weeks you had this immense amount of spectacle which created, and of course that means advertising and all kinds of opportunities in that time and it means a consumption phase of about a couple of weeks where everybody's is concentrating their attention to the 400 meters and the 15 million meters and all those kinds of things.

We get deeply involved in particular stories for the particular athletes and so on. So it's a wonderful, wonderful example of the kind of consumerism like all loves, which is a consumer symbol. All wheats and forms of consumerism is kind, which are very much concentrating on these behaviors, things like cruise liners. And of course what we find is find 10 cruise liners, maybe two or 3000 on each boat converging in one Greek island on them. So the impossibility of some of this is coming never heard this idea that consumerism increasingly even the capital society is taken up with a consumption spectacle and that the mounting spectacle becomes a very important aspect of the dynamics. So this is a very good thing from the standpoint of capital a tool sort of support. So like games called it some dust. Secondly, it's also important because when you apply for Ian games you have to show that you're willing to build the stadiums and build all those kind of things.

So there's a huge kind of building boom. And the developers love it. The developers kind of gone through it. In fact, the developers kind are constantly pushing municipalities, doing Olympic big games goes and for all this stuff that comes along and even when the Olympic games which until recently didn't make a gross profit for x for the city, the profit for the developers and all the rest of it is actually very significant. So even when individual capitalists can make a great deal of profit over Olympic big gains, they may be little city making loss. But recently, particularly since the London games that bits have actually turned out to be profitable.

Interesting. One of the first Olympics organizations that was all was Los Angeles and came to coming back to Los Angeles and one of the things that's curious about it is that it was not going very profitably until somebody came in and we organized the whole profitable lines and that person was known other and Vic Romney, then Romney came in and he had suddenly say actually a city make a profit as well as all the developers. There aren't. So here you a situation where you really can't explain the structure of the Olympic games. These stood out in boing capital, but on the other hand, if you just said it was just capital and it's not also about playing and what goes with that, all of that. So here's beautifully example of the way in which those two aspects of society are inter national now with a tendency, Mount Marxists and so on succumb to this myself on a clinician with a tendency to kind of say, well Marx explains everything.

Well no he doesn't. He explains the cab motor production excellently. He doesn't explain, but all of this about clan and responsibilities and clan structures and all that. So the social formation then is what is going on in the social formation can only be understood by this collision if you like, and coming together of clown history and loyalty to a place and nationalism and all the rest of it and place bound politics and so on. I think that together with dynamics of cap in so much you like class society and clearing society brought together in something like the Olympic games but ivy that they are going to go on all of the time. So that something like the Olympic gangs where all of this is very obvious, it is just much more separately worked out in other sort of situations. So it's this interplay between nationalism and it's a very interesting to that actually the attempt on the left by then in Luxembourg and so on, to actually come up with a very secure Marx distinctive Marxist understanding of the international question.

I would argue that that is profoundly in this place that you cannot do that. You cannot subed the national question under Marxist then say, well the national question is there, it has been there all and along it undertaking particular forms but it clear out co clients and supports and sometimes open minds. So have these two aspects of society, class, society, client society which are actually revenue evolved in terms of the understanding the dynamics of the social formation. So when I start to look at the social formation, I don't simply say, well everything's from of craft. I kind of say no, I'm going to look through it from the lens of craft because I'm always going to find the lens of grass as it's the shed light, all kinds of things that are going on. Even wallows for example, there's some very strong economic interest preservation, rain war weapons produces water flowing to support Ukraine.

It's actually up any pockets and industrial complex ments in and so on. So whenever I'm in any situation with China, I'm always trying to saying to myself, well is this best looked at from a standpoint or class? What's the relationship situation has I think about aspects of, but then there's a third damage and this one's a bit more problematic, but I think it absolutely critical. And that third one is also a C. So three seas, glass, clan and caste. Now caste is very interesting, can say how many societies are caste societies? You look at Iran, you say, well we ran the caste society and you struck it a across society, it's built across society painting volution which started to democratizing but he got taken by and now strong presence. And so actually if you look plenty of you, many of the states which they're much more about cars rather than cars and learned much more about cast rather than clan.

So berg, what we're looking at in case of cast is something else. And there's a from recent book by Wilkinson and this, he discovers this class with a lot of caste activity going on the ground and therefore she starts to try to explain everything in terms of cars. Well, you can't do that and you're going to get it all wrong. But on the other hand, if you ignore the existence of cars and you think that somehow lead from explaining everything that's going on in caste society by terms of cra, if you think you can do that, you're going to get it all wrong. So you have to look at these independent forms of social activity. You need class cars and when the cast goes, what you had is a really interesting thing about rah. The most important thing in caste society is the preservation of rah and the preservation of the hierarchy is of course often this is res, but it's also preserved by strong thinking in which your idea of some hierarchy English society is absolutely critical. And having ever been Wilkerson arm is that the perpetuation of the racial divide in the United States?

It's hard to explain it in terms of clan and it's hard to explain it in terms of craft. And the only way can nearly explain is perpetuation 200 years, 250 years is that it's really, really some kind of forecast phenomena, the notion of white supremacy and some, it's not as if this notion of white s demon society by such like which are qualit, it's not as if it comes out of nowhere that has been yoing around for pine of cast structures which exist in society when people live there. And then Lin, it's interesting this because when you start to say to yourself, well what are the kind of social relations were cast? So clearance, I'm in academia, the question I pose is what kind of social relationships exist inside of academia? Well, there is a class relation, no question about, but class relation to me, those who are predominantly employed in of storage and in mass adjunct teachers and there's a class Dubai and it's pretty, that's clear. But then within academia itself, amongst the prophet Ians, there are certain hierarchical structures and those hierarchical structures are essentially about cast rather in class. In your social sciences for example, you can book around just life, but there's no question you never brown in class and running bass and sofa sciences. There're the economists of course and that the economists people speak to economists and don't talk to anybody else. And so we have a comment.

I as personally this be, I'm constantly dealing if I can't question cars, I'm a geographer from Z. Now geography is pretty way down on the cars system. Administrators and universities will abolish geography in carbons all over the place. And even no problem, they never do that economics, they might reconstruct an economic department particularly difficult, but I cannot be a respectable university without an economics department. It can be a very respectful university without geography department. So I'm a geographer, so I'm a caste, you figure I'm also a Marxist because it's even worse because that makes me a double. So my caste situation is particularly low and frankly in my life that has played a very important light way in which I adjust myself. I had to try to conflate people that somehow or rather a geographer and memo Marist has something that interesting to say, look, it's taken really a long time to do it.

And it was only about 15, 20 years ago where somebody who was very important position in Marxist history so on said to me, I've never read anything you've written. And I said, no, why not? I've written about and berg. I said, well why not? And he said, well, the only reason I can think, he said, because you were a geographer and because you were a geographer, I couldn't imagine you would have any interest in this. Now that's a typical cast. Now it's a typical caste kind of comment. And the structures inside of academia are very much caste structures. And I would like to sometimes said that in the United States it's a political class. I don't think there's a political class. I think there's a political caste, the United States that the State Department whole kind of wr of Harvard turn up with sorts of people. Governance, in other words the governing structure in the United States, yes, you a class relationship going on.

There's all also a casting talent and the cast mentality, it is about the idea that there are some people who are willing to rule. And my own father actually problem Satan did not biblical, but my father believed even though he had a mixed class background, he really believed in the iv, the aristocracy, he was born to move. And when I was growing up after the work after World War ii, it pretty clear that all the powerful positions in society, descendants of the aristocracy and that the aristocracy, interestingly, the person who broke that relationship between the born from law and the aristocracy was Margaret Thatcher. And then there was a new kind of conservatism came in, which was a women's breaking you like. But up until the 1918, effectively Britain was governed in the government and all the people in the service and so on came from Alsbridge backgrounds.

And it also then turned out to be true that the first labor government was also mainly taken up with came from Alsbridge. There's a ruling cast and in France you find this, there's actually a system which is very much about Germany and in that system is incredibly important and very powerful to this day. One of the big problems that the left has right now is the leader of the left man called men. Sean, very intelligent and very interesting guy is not respected by the political castes in France because he never went to one of the, in other words. So the whole kind of caste structure is terribly important and important in terms of, and Mars and Angles started to think about this in a particular way about the United States. I mean ENGs kind, I can't remember actually Engles were Mark Tony said, look, the United States is very interesting because everywhere else, everywhere in Europe there were the residual sub feudal classes will have a great deal of political power and caste power as it were.

They didn't use the word caste power. I'm substituting that for what they said. But they said, but in the United States you don't have that. There is no residual. So what happens in the United States, you actually work your way to create the institutions to build a cast structure of preclinical management. And actually one of the paradoxes of the United States is that popular opinion in the United States, which every four years was given able to elect and what is supposed to be concerned with electing a government actually going to have a tremendous indication how the world is going to be governed. But most people in the United States don't care about that. They don't care about what is that government going to do for us. So that the whole structure of governance in the United States is an anti class structure and in the anti structure, which is that has involved in you down at a very distinctly presence.

And there was a sort of a thing they saw the day which was confirmed. This one was kind of said the people who were in the State Department, the population of the State Department has a certain intellectual origin. It's beginning to change a little bit, but it was described as Male, pale and Yale. And I think it's just a very interesting way to look at it. And so the caste structures are significant and one of the things that loon does is to say that these structures are deeply embedded. We don't really quite understand how they are perpetuating, but suddenly somebody will come up and say, now white people are superior regrets and that there is a hierarchy, but genius hierarchy preference. So when I'm looking at a situation and asking questions about re-elections coming up in the United States right now, please, I kind of say, well, what are the ways in which cars class clear are actually gone?

He's red and he's benefiting from what and how are they mobilizing and how are they presenting themselves? Are they presenting themselves in born to me? Donald Trump in some ways tends to do that. There's no question in his mind that Mr. And don't people look at think that must be somebody who was born to bull. Where's the Aris crack to do it? Well, he's not an Aris, but he doing, look, Ralph mobilizing as a notion cast to particular ways. So this is something that I always have in my mind. So in the social formation, I would argue you have to look at the way in which dynamics and class system, the dynamics of capital cooperation, which Mark did a very good job of might sing, intercept with Ahan history of Klan, which he didn't, and how to what degree does caste structure, he was aware of all three and actually mentioned this in his historical writing about Novo into detail.

I think this to me has been a very useful way trying to understand the world. And I know it's really some crude way in some ways, but nevertheless crude ways sometimes very helpful that a white hand together particular understand particular situation. So I hope that my confessions on the fact that Mark still explain everything, does a damn good job of explaining the mode of production, but doesn't do such a brilliant job and understand the dynamics of Klan society that we even appreciating very much the nature of US land society. And he certainly understood the importance of caste in India and all the rest it but didn't quite understand how the role of caste willing, newly caste not ruling class is in fact very importantness.

It's my confession, this.