Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

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How capital operates and where the world and

China are going: a conversation between David
Harvey and Paik Nak-chung

David Harvey & Paik Nak-chung

To cite this article: David Harvey & Paik Nak-chung (2017) How capital operates and where the
world and China are going: a conversation between David Harvey and Paik Nak-chung, Inter-Asia
Cultural Studies, 18:2, 251-268, DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2017.1309501

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INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES, 2017
VOL. 18, NO. 2, 251–268
https://doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2017.1309501

How capital operates and where the world and China are going: a
conversation between David Harvey and Paik Nak-chung
David HARVEY and PAIK Nak-chung

ABSTRACT
The conversation first takes up the theme of David Harvey’s public lecture in
Seoul, “Realization Crises and the Transformation of Everyday Life.” Harvey
stresses that the relative neglect of Volume 2 of Marx’s Capital has prevented
scholars and activists from paying due attention to the crucial importance of
value realization for the reproduction of capital. The discussion then moves
on to the city as both a site of production and of liberation struggles, a topic
so far largely neglected in the Marxist tradition. Regarding the neoliberal
phase of capitalism, Harvey calls it a “new imperialism” characterized by
“accumulation by dispossession” as its guiding principle. Paik agrees to that
distinguishing feature as compared with the immediately preceding phase
where creation and appropriation of surplus value were more prominent, but
suggests that “accumulation by dispossession” may have been an essential
attribute of capitalism from the sixteenth century on. After ranging over a
variety of topics, the conversation looks at the latest developments in the
Chinese economy, how they may illustrate Harvey’s notion of capital’s “spatial
fix,” and what other potentialities may yet be found in China’s diverse and
complex reality.

Paik Nak-chung (PNC): Let me first thank you
for coming all the way to Korea to join the 50th
anniversary celebrations of The Changbi Quar-
terly. You’ve had a busy schedule. There was
another anniversary event we were holding this
week, the 2016 East Asian Critical Journals Con-
ference, and you were good enough to come and
sit through a whole afternoon even without the
help of English translation. Then you gave a pub-
lic lecture the day before yesterday on “Realiz-
ation Crises and Transformation of Daily Life,”
and yesterday you had a workshop with a smaller
group of specialists and activists concentrating
on your book Rebel Cities (2013) but with discus-
sion ranging over a wide area. Would you care to
share some of your impressions of the events you
have been participating in?
David Harvey (DH): One of the things I’ve
found in my travels around the world is that
events organized by publishers are more inter-
esting than those organized by universities,
because the publishers bring in a more diverse
audience, a diverse public, rather than going
for the academic spectacle. I thought the mix
of the audience was great. I didn’t see anyone
going to sleep, one of the first criteria I use,
and I think the reactions in terms of the kinds
of questions raised there and also in the work-
shop the following day indicate a widespread
concern at least in certain segments of society
here, in relationship to the problems I think
are central. So, it was possible to have a good
conversation. But you will have to ask the audi-
ence how helpful it was.

CONTACT Paik Nak-chung paiknc@snu.ac.kr

© 2017 Paik Nak-chung. All Rights Reserved.
252 D. HARVEY AND PAIK N.-C.
PNC: Regarding the topic of your lecture, I
don’t know if this is true abroad or not, but in
Korea people who are interested in Marxian
economics don’t talk much about realization.
Even though “the contradictory unity of pro-
duction and realization” is a central Marxian
concept, that aspect tends to get neglected,
and to the detriment of the practical struggle,
as you point out. You said this was partly
because Volume II of Capital is so much less
absorbing than Volume I. I suppose this applies
to Marxist circles in other countries too.
DH: Yes, there are a number of ways of reading
Marx. I increasingly focus on the idea that he
theorizes capital as an organic evolving system.
But it is not a simple organic metaphor, it’s not
like a body, it’s more like a loosely coordinated
ecosystem with many parts related to each
other. The totality of it is being driven forward
by the circulation and accumulation of capital.
If you look at the circulation process as a
whole, you see all kinds of places where the cir-
culation process can be interrupted, all kinds of
points of difficulty. You cannot understand the
totality of the system by concentrating on pro-
duction alone. Of course, it is mainly pro-
duction that Marx is concerned with in
Volume I of Capital, which everybody recog-
nizes is not only a wonderful piece of reasoning
on the economy but is also a literary master-
piece; you get to Volume II where the circula-
tion process is studied from a different
perspective and no one would claim it is a lit-
erary masterpiece.
PNC: And maybe that prevents them from
going on to Volume III, where Marx brings
together production and circulation.
DH: He tries to do that a bit in Volume II, too.
Increasingly over the years I’ve felt irritated by
the fact that even quite senior Marxist scholars
say to me “I’ve read Volume II and it was so unin-
teresting that I’ve never studied it again.” Person-
ally, I’ve always found that many of the themes
approached in Volume II are very important.
For example, when I talk about, say, time-space
compression in The Condition of Postmodernity,
a lot of this comes out of Marx’s discussions of
turnover times and the importance of accelera-
tion of turnover times, which is right in the
middle of Volume II of Capital. I have always
been learning a lot from the content of Volume
II, and I think it is such a shame it was not pre-
sented in an attractive and interesting form. But
Marx says even in the first volume of Capital
that if you cannot realize the commodity in mon-
etary form through a sale in the market, then
there is no value. So, value is entirely contingent
upon the conditions of its realization, and the
conditions of its realization are not studied at
all in Volume I. He simply assumes all commod-
ities trade at their value.
PNC: Well, in the publishing industry you
would feel this very acutely, because if you
print books and they don’t sell, it’s worse than
having just blank paper on your hands.
DH: Yes, I noticed for instance, my Companion
to Reading Volume I (2010) is selling very well,
whereas Companion to Volume II (2013), not so
well. In spite of all my feelings that we ought to
read Volume II, it tends not to happen.
PNC: What particularly impressed me in what
you were saying about realization was how all
this impinged upon practical struggles; it’s not
just a matter of analysing how capital works
but it really makes a difference to what and
how we should act.
DH: One of the big arenas of struggle these days
is what is happening to housing costs and rent
levels, and finding affordable shelter in world
cities. This is a problem where even if you
give workers more money for engaging in pro-
duction, a lot of it gets immediately taken
back by land and construction interests in the
form of high housing costs. Every city I go to,
if I ask “what is happening to property prices?”

the answer is “yes, this is a serious problem!”
There are struggles going on around gentrifica-
tion, with developers, with what goes on with
the evictions, the necessity to clear space to
give to the developers to build their high-rises.
Developers love to build megaprojects, which
the state is often involved in, and they also
love to build high-rise high value condomi-
niums. They do not want to build affordable
housing for poor people. So you get these
incredible inequalities emerging in cities, and
this becomes a part of the daily life concerns
of whole populations. For me, it has always
been very important to try to integrate processes
of this sort into an understanding of the circula-
tion of capital and the realization of value in the
market. I try to introduce it into Marx’s general
theory but to do that you have to acknowledge
the organic notion of “capital” as an evolving
ecological system of flows of capital. So, when
you say people are concerned about these ques-
tions, yes! And this is just one issue that hits
them hard. There are other questions such as
rising transit costs. Mobility within the city
becomes an important question. Pretty much
all urban issues are about the realization of
value through the consumptions of goods and
the price of those goods. How the value of com-
modities is monetized is a crucial part of the
economic problem.
PNC: Another major theme of the lecture and
of your life-work, I would say, was the impor-
tance of identifying the city rather than the fac-
tory as the main site of surplus value creation
nowadays, and hence the major site of liberation
struggles.
In connection with that, you talked about what’s
happening in China, or what the Chinese are
doing both within China and all over Eurasia,
Africa and Latin America, as the newest
example on an unprecedented scale of what
you call “spatial fix.” As you know, at the East
Asia Critical Journals Conference we had pre-
sentations on China’s “One Belt, One Road”
INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 253
project and there were many people, not only
from mainland China but from Taiwan and
Hong Kong, who took a more positive view of
this project than your characterization of it as
the latest and biggest spatial fix by neoliberal
capitalism. You’ve heard some of these argu-
ments in China?
DH: I have some contradictory feelings about
these projects. Looking at it internally within
China there was no high-speed rail network
until about ten years ago, and now it is all com-
pletely integrated. Frankly, I prefer to go from
Shanghai to Beijing by high-speed rail than to
fly. I can see that very many people are benefit-
ing from the interweaving of the transport net-
work of China. So I wouldn’t say this is an
entirely negative thing. But when you look at
the class of people riding those trains, it is pro-
fessionals and business elites who are riding the
trains, so there is a class disparity with respect
who is getting the advantage of this vast invest-
ment.
With respect to the other side of it, a lot of this
development was debt financed. So one of the
consequences of this vast investment pro-
gramme is that the debt-to-GDP level in
China has shot up to one of the highest in the
world. There is then the question of who is
going to pay off that debt. As we’ve seen from
typical capitalist behaviour, and I’m not saying
China is necessarily going to do it this way,
usually the people who end up paying the debt
are the least privileged and most marginalized
population. The same questions have to be
posed regarding the return on China’s foreign
loans and investments.
Consider the case of Ecuador. More than half of
foreign investment in Ecuador is Chinese. One
of the Chinese projects is a huge hydroelectric
dam to meet 60% of the energy needs of Ecua-
dor. Of course they use Chinese cement and
Chinese steel, so they are absorbing Chinese
excess capacity through this construction. But
254 D. HARVEY AND PAIK N.-C.
they are lending money to Ecuador, and Ecua-
dor is going to have to pay it off. One of the
ways to do this is to give China the right to
exploit mineral resources in the south of Ecua-
dor in whatever way they want. The result is a
conflict between indigenous populations and
Chinese mining companies. The Chinese
mining companies are not themselves involved
but there has been strong repression of indigen-
ous movements in the south of Ecuador mainly
by local governments, supported by the national
government. These are the kinds of conse-
quences that are often not taken into account
when we say this is a good thing, that there is
this renewable energy source that is going to
be tapped that is going to meet the electricity
needs of much of the population.
So, there are all sorts of questions that have to
be taken into account. But I think people at the
Critical Journals conference are not wrong to
say that the creation of a transport network
that integrates the world into the economies
of not only China but Europe and Africa, is a
good thing. I’m just saying we have always to
ask two questions, one is who benefits and
who is going to pay, and the second is what
are the environmental consequences. When I
added those things in, I think I’m less likely
to say I applaud such projects and more
inclined to express serious reservations about
them.
PNC: What do you think of the argument pre-
sented at the same Conference by the Taiwanese
geographer Suh Jin-yeh that in geopolitical
terms the project represents a defensive action
on the part of the Chinese and a healthy chal-
lenge to US hegemony?
DH: I think there is no question that is the case.
But I don’t think that in terms of absorbing
surplus capital and surplus labour the Chinese
had any option. They were faced with mass
unemployment and the closing down of a lot
of their steel capacity; in other words, there
was an economic logic driving them to export
capital to absorb their surplus productive
capacity, irrespective of whether they had a geo-
political plan or not. I’m not privy to the think-
ing of the Chinese Communist Party obviously,
but I suspect that probably both of those
elements were involved. But the economic
element in my theoretical way of understanding
the dynamics, the spatial dynamics of capital-
ism, would be to say that the Chinese by 2005,
2006, 2007, 2008 were in the position where
they had to do something like this to keep
their economy growing and in order to keep it
even stable.
PNC: Well, I don’t support those East Asian
colleagues of ours at the conference who make
a perfunctory nod to the capitalist logic and to
the notion of spatial fix and then go on to
focus almost exclusively on the geopolitical
dimension. That hardly takes into account the
fact that, as you point out, the Chinese, because
of the logic of capital, had to do something of
this sort. But yesterday at the workshop you
talked about two logics of power, the territorial
logic and the capitalist logic. Could we bring
this notion in and see the Chinese effort not
as a simple case of neoliberalism but as a new
effort to combine the two logics? As you said,
Adam Smith was really the one who advocated
such a combination: the working of the “invis-
ible hand” in the market would contribute to
the wealth of nations including the people of
those nations. I think maybe capitalism up to
the 1960s did more or less manage that sort of
combination in one way or another, and the
notion of the developmental state represents
that objective, whereas neo-liberalism may be
an effort to go all out for capitalist logic,
although evidently supported by state power,
including the state’s military and police power.
If you look at the situation in that context, the
Chinese may be trying to offer a revision to
this neoliberal attempt to go all out for the capi-
talist logic. Whether the attempt will succeed is
a different question, of course.

DH: I used to have this argument all the time
with Giovanni Arrighi. Giovanni’s point in
many ways was that we shouldn’t assume that
just because we see various aspects of the mar-
ket penetration and conversion and develop-
ment in China, that the Chinese state has
given up entirely on development of its own
socialist logic of power. The question he
would pose was not to have any predictions
that come from this analysis but that we should
be very aware and alert to the question of the
different strategies the Chinese might adopt.
But my argument with Giovanni went along
the following lines: yes, you might have been
right up until the late 1990s that the socialist
logic was still an option, but since the 2000s
or so, I think the Chinese territorial logic has
increasingly been driven by the capitalist logic
of over-accumulation and spatial expansion.
They have unleashed the capitalist logic and
are having a hard time containing it because
the capitalist logic is not entirely within their
control. They have to deal with the global mar-
ket conditions, so the huge impact in China of
the crash of the consumer market in the United
States, in effect closing down a lot of export
industries in China, particularly in the south
of China in that period around 2007 and
2008, was an example of the capitalist logic
sweeping in and, in effect, taking control.
Then the Chinese have to react and they have
to react in capital’s terms, not in their own
terms. I’d argue that when you unleash the capi-
talist tiger you end up clinging on to its tail. I
may be exaggerating but the degree to which
the Chinese government with its territorial
logic can actually control the capitalist logic
has to be questioned. I think they are far less
in control than they were, say, in the 1990s
and I think the control has been slipping away
from them. The more they move towards things
like the certification of their economy as a mar-
ket exchange system, the more they have to con-
form to WTO standards, the more they have to
integrate with a capitalist logic of power, the less
free choice they are going to have in terms of
INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 255
what their options are. That was the core of
my main argument with Giovanni, that he was
being too optimistic about the ability of the ter-
ritorial socialist logic to keep control. The capi-
talist system has increasingly become
financialized, and the integration of the Chinese
financial structures into global finance has
soared. We’re seeing all kinds of concessions,
it seems to me, on the part of the Chinese gov-
ernment to the capitalist logic.
PNC: Taking up your image of having
unleashed the tiger and holding onto its tail, I
think much depends on how healthy the tiger
is and how long-lived and vigorous it is
expected to remain. But let’s return to that
point later to address the general situation of
global capitalism.
Another question that came up at your lecture,
during the question and answer period, was
your notion of “new imperialism” and its
characteristic of “accumulation by disposses-
sion.” You said yourself that you had not suffi-
ciently distinguished that notion from Marx’s
“primitive accumulation.” Would you care to
go back to the clarification?
DH: Primitive accumulation in Marx is about
how the preconditions are created for capital
accumulation to begin; those preconditions
are that there must already be a wage labour
system in existence, there must already be a
monetized commodity exchange system, there
must already be a market in commodities.
All those elements have to be there before
capitalists can come in and say I’m going to
take some of this wage labour and I’m going
to turn it to producing surplus value in
order to produce commodities that can be
sold in the market, to get the capitalist circula-
tion process going.
Another way of putting it is to say that in the
early stages of capitalist development there
was an immense scarcity of wage labour and
256 D. HARVEY AND PAIK N.-C.
an immense scarcity of money capital. There-
fore, ways had to be found to produce wage
labour and to produce money capital, without
capital having an ability to reproduce the con-
ditions of its own existence. That was done by
the violence of primitive accumulation, forcing
people away from the land so that they had
no option except to be a wage labour force in
order to live; there had to be sufficient moneti-
zation in the economy so that the money could
be assembled in some way; there needed to be a
primitive banking system to assemble the
money which could then start to circulate as
capital.
Now all of these preconditions took a while to
fall into place, and I think the purpose of
Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation is to
say that these preconditions were created
through violent interventions in traditional
societies, destruction and hoarding of gold,
and things like that. Through the church and
the state, usurers played a role in bankrupting
the feudal aristocracy and liberating money for
the bourgeois. This is what Marx’s theory of
primitive accumulation was all about. Now,
while Marx didn’t deny that elements of primi-
tive accumulation will always be there, he did
say that they are relatively unimportant once
capitalism starts to circulate because capital is
very expert at producing the conditions of its
own reproduction. That is, it produces sur-
pluses, and it produces money as capital, and
it produces a wage labour force through the
creation of an industrial reserve army. So he
drops the question of primitive accumulation.
Now, in certain parts of world we’ve seen the
continuation of primitive accumulation, and
it is still continuing. There is a destruction of
peasant societies going on in India, and of
course, in China, too, that I think that would
best be looked at as continuation of primitive
accumulation in the contemporary era.
But what I’m concerned with is what happens
when there is abundant capital, abundant labour,
and at the same time we see the processes of rob-
bery of asset values from one segment of the
population which go to the pockets of another
segment of the population. I use the example of
the foreclosure crisis and say, six to eight million
people lost their houses in the United States.
African-American populations lost something
like 60 to 70% of their asset values in 2007 and
2008; white populations lost about a third of
their asset values. So there are these huge losses
for various segments of the population; where
does all of that asset value go? Wall Street is pay-
ing itself bonuses roughly equivalent to those
losses. There was a US judge who looked at all
of this and said, “This is one of biggest transfers
of wealth in American history from one class to
another,” and of course it is from underprivi-
leged populations to privileged populations.
What this means is that even in a depression
situation, the rich can get richer, and the poor
get very much poorer.
PNC: You know the remark made by, I think it
was, Andrew Mellon, that “in a depression
assets return to their rightful owners”?
DH: Yes, this is exactly right. And so we have to
have a language to talk about these transfers of
wealth that occur from one class to another by
mechanisms like the foreclosure crisis, by the
way that corporations file for bankruptcy, by
the way that pharmaceutical companies jack
up the prices of pharmaceuticals from $5 a pill
to $500 a pill and there is nothing to stop
them. This is what I call the accumulation by
dispossession. One of the signs of that is a gen-
eral process around the world of land grabs, of
expulsions and evictions which are going on.
This is not about creating wage labour forces;
this is about transferring assets from one class
to another. So that is what I mean by accumu-
lation by dispossession, which allows Wall
Street to flourish during the period of crisis.
The other expression is that the rich never let
a good crisis go to waste, and in fact a lot of
them benefited a great deal from the crisis of

2007 and 2008. In order to understand that, I
thought it was important to talk about the
mechanisms of wealth transfer, which are
often associated by the way with the realization
question, hence the connection between realiz-
ation crises and accumulation by dispossession.
It did seem to me important not to call such
transfers of wealth primitive accumulation.
They are occurring in a different context and
have a different mechanism.
PNC: Yes, it is important to distinguish between
accumulation by dispossession that occurs
when there wasn’t sufficient capital accumu-
lation, and then the kind of accumulation by
dispossession that is occurring when there is
too much capital. At the same time, I personally
would like to expand the notion of accumu-
lation by dispossession to include all the periods
beginning with primitive accumulation through
the period when accumulation by dispossession
is less salient to the new phase where it again
becomes prominent. Because the first stage of
so-called primitive accumulation is virtually
coterminous with the period of agricultural
capitalism, involving also a large-scale dispos-
session of the wealth of the New World and of
Africa. But even in the 18th century, the Atlan-
tic slave trade reached its peak in the late 18th
century, and there were colonial ventures every-
where. So there never was a period when there
wasn’t accumulation by dispossession. Actually,
I think somewhere in your new book The Ways
of the World1 you say that the brilliance of Marx
is that by abstracting from all the many concrete
historical and social conditions, he demon-
strated that even under the best of conditions,
even when the conditions did not involve out-
right dispossession, capital would still end up
producing its own grave diggers. Now the
other side of this Marxian project according to
you is that it tended to make the followers of
Marx forget that Marx was really carrying out
a very special operation, a rather abstract oper-
ation, and the social and historical circum-
stances should be put back if we are going to
INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 257
analyse reality adequately. So applying that
insight, I would say that even in the period
that Marx was concentrating on in his economic
analysis, accumulation by dispossession was
going on. In a way, it is really as much a part
of capitalism as accumulation through the
expropriation of surplus value produced by
the labourers.
DH: I wouldn’t disagree with that. Sometimes I
cannot remember what I said and what I
intended to say. What I intended to say was
that I think that primitive accumulation has
always been with us throughout the whole his-
tory of capitalism. I don’t think accumulation
by dispossession is new, but I think that from
the 1970s onwards when capital was looking
to invest, the classic thing would be to invest
in production and get surplus value out of the
labourer in the way Marx describes. But there
were fewer and fewer opportunities to do that,
so capital started to invest more and more in
operations that were about accumulation by
dispossession. So accumulation by disposses-
sion became more and more significant than it
had been in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1950s
and 1960s, I would argue, that the processes of
primitive accumulation were still alive and
going on, particularly in the so-called Third
World, but accumulation by dispossession was
not as significant. Were we doing investigations
in the 1960s we wouldn’t see so much going on
around us that would look like accumulation by
dispossession.
We would not have the kind of events such as
what has happened with the pharmaceutical
industry and drug prices, with hedge funds
taking over pharmaceutical companies, and
raising the price of a drug immensely. But,
interestingly, individuals don’t pay that, the
insurance companies do. Later, everyone com-
plains that the medical prices are rising, but a
lot of this has to do with the fact that hedge
funds are engaging in accumulation by dispos-
session. I would extend it also to the loss of
258 D. HARVEY AND PAIK N.-C.
pension rights; there has been a lot of raiding of
pension funds, the loss of healthcare insurance
rights, the loss even at the level of state pro-
vision of education, so there are a lot of losses
of this kind. I think that contemporary capital-
ism has a lot more in your face accumulation by
dispossession going on. I thought it very impor-
tant to try to name it that way in part, also
because if I go to talk to an Iowa farmer and
say, do you realize you are a victim of primitive
accumulation, they say what the hell is that, but
if you say accumulation by dispossession they
understand perfectly well what you mean. So,
I think it is an understandable term to talk
about a process that people see going on around
them all the time.
PNC: Well, let’s now move on to cities. I think it
was very important that you foregrounded the
plain empirical fact that most of the popular
struggles of recent decades have been urban
struggles. You also cited the example of the
Paris Commune, which was more of an urban
struggle than a strictly proletarian uprising.
The question is how to interpret this empirical
fact. You pointed out that most of the left or pro-
gressive thinkers and activists still don’t realize
that this is really where surplus value production
is taking place and the struggles are about what
to do with the produced value, including the
built environment, the struggles between the
producers and non-producers. I think that is a
very important insight that we should hold onto.
DH: I think so; that has always been important
to me. It’s been very hard to get people on the
left to accept that urban struggles are class
struggles. But they have a rather different con-
tent and take a rather different form. To give
you an example, both Manuel Castells and I
were actively involved in exploring the urban
question, and Manuel was happy to talk about
these in class struggle terms in his early writings
and looked at events such as the Paris Com-
mune and so on, and didn’t see them as not
being part of what Marx was theorizing. But
when he came to The City and the Grassroots
he suddenly decided that since these were not
struggles over the production of surplus value
in the workplace, they didn’t belong in Marxian
theory. And that, therefore, urban struggles
were not integrateable with struggles in the
workplace. I could never understand why he
would take that position. Of course, from that
time on he left the Marxist fold, went off in
the directions he went off in.
I really can’t see why that should be and I think
again, I know I’m repeating myself, but it comes
back to the failure to identify that realization
struggles are as significant as the struggles
over production. As a result, I find myself
accused of neglecting the struggles over pro-
duction and I say, no, I think that if we are look-
ing at what is going on in Shenzhen in China
then proletarian struggles are significant, or if
we are looking at what’s going on in Bangladesh
then the proletarian forms of struggle are vitally
significant. But we have to bring them together
with understanding these other questions. So,
for example, Manuel’s interpretation of the
Paris Commune was that it was not a proletar-
ian uprising, it was an urban revolt. I don’t see
them as separate, and don’t see as anyone
could see them as separate, but that is what
divides us. I am using Manuel as an example
of a left thinker who could never adjust to the
idea that urban struggles are fundamentally
class struggles. This is so, even though there
are some urban struggles that are founded on
what are called “not in my backyard” politics,
which is about the bourgeoisie protecting its
rights, so it isolates itself in gated communities
and then becomes very active in creating an
urban social movement that is anti-develop-
ment and exclusionary. In the field of urban
struggles there are many issues of that kind
that you have to deal with. The clarity of
workers versus capitalists disappears; it
becomes much more muddled, but at the
same time the analysis becomes much more rea-
listic. I come down on the side of realism, saying

okay, we have to look at these struggles, to try to
find their class content and put that class con-
tent together with worker’s struggles in order
to build a critical political project.
I was always impressed by the fact that Gramsci,
way back, in about 1919, was writing about this.
He argued that it is all very well that we organize
factory councils, but we need to support them
with neighbourhood organizations. He then
made a very significant remark: when we
think about the working class in a neighbour-
hood, he said, we have a far better perspective
on what the needs and wants and desires are
of the whole working class, instead of just that
segment of the working class which we are deal-
ing with in the factory. And if we can form
neighbourhood organizations, which would
include the street sweepers, the bank clerks,
the transit workers etc., all the people who are
usually not treated as being part of the working
class, and we can assemble them and we have
neighbourhood organization, that neighbour-
hood organization itself can go on strike in sup-
port of a struggle for socialism …. So Gramsci
recognized the importance of neighbourhood
organizing parallel to factory organization.
Unfortunately he never really developed this
into a general theory, but in these kinds of com-
ments he clearly indicated the way I would want
to think about these issues. Historically, I would
say that workplace struggles succeed far more
often when they have very strong community
and neighbourhood support. If they don’t
have community support, who is going to pass
the sandwiches in to the people occupying a fac-
tory?
PNC: You mention the example of Northum-
bria in the British coal miners’ strike.
DH: This is also true in some of the classic
American struggles, say, Flint, Michigan in the
1930s, people in the neighbourhoods provided
support and sustenance to the striking workers
and the success of the strike owed a great deal to
INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 259
that.
PNC: In your lecture you mentioned the case of a
small restaurant owner in New York City who
pays his employees very low wages but doesn’t
feel he is exploiting them because he is working
much harder than anyone else, and simply can’t
afford to pay them any more. And where does
his money go? It goes to the banks, to the land-
lords, and so on. So, she or he would be a natural
ally of any urban struggle by the working-class.
Now, I would raise a theoretical question. The
classical criterion distinguishes proletariat from
bourgeoisie centres on ownership of the means
of production; because the man owns a restaurant
you could say he owns his means of production.
But perhaps we should revise this criterion, or
apply it differently, because given the scale of the
means of production in the present world and
also the power of financial institutions over
small owners, how truly does a small restaurant
owner in New York City own his means of pro-
duction? I think much less than a highly paid cor-
porate executive, regardless of the latter’s stock
ownership.
DH: Yes.
PNC: Then, the restaurant owner would be a
potential member of the working class rather
than just an ally in urban struggles. Of course,
he himself would never think of himself as pro-
letarian, and we needn’t push the point to him.
The trouble, however, is that many left thinkers
themselves don’t think of that person as prole-
tarian until he or she goes out of business and
falls away from the “petty bourgeoisie.”
DH: I am always very conscious of the fact that
Marx in his theoretical writings is always talking
about roles, not particular individuals. For
instance, many working-class people have pen-
sion plans invested in the stock market. As an
individual you can actually have several differ-
ent roles. In the case of the restaurant owner,
yes, they own the plates and the other means
260 D. HARVEY AND PAIK N.-C.
of production, but one of the means of pro-
duction is the land, the space, let’s call it space
rather than land, and if they don’t own that
space they have to rent it. So somebody else
owns the space as a means of production, and
space or land is one of the basic means of pro-
duction. The same applies to money. Money is a
means of production, a means to create capital,
so when you get into Volume III of Capital you
are looking at rent on land and interest on bor-
rowed money. Now, again, there has been a bit
of a failure with reading Marx’s Capital. Not
enough attention is paid to rent and to interest,
which complicates the question of the means of
production. You can own certain physical
means of production but if you don’t control
the land, then some of your means of pro-
duction are effectively owned by somebody
else. So the effective position of the restaurant
owner in New York City has these multiple
elements in it. Of course they don’t want to be
called working class, but that is what they are
from the standpoint of not controlling the
land and money as basic means of production.
We can then focus on a broad area of discontent
which is all too frequently ignored. For instance,
in New York City a lot of traditional family-type
restaurants are closing down and the whole fab-
ric of urban life is changing as a result. Where
there was a family restaurant is now a branch
of a bank, or a chain store. The quality of life,
the texture of urban life, is being destroyed by
rising rents. Actually, there have been some
very interesting protests. There is a café on
Madison Square in New York City that had
been there since the 1930s and was a famous
place where people went, and due to rising
rents they had to close down. There was a public
protest, it even got into the pages of the
New York Times that people were saying this
can’t go on, this destruction of the qualities of
urban life. Issues of this kind start to arise in
urban settings. I think we need a more open
approach to the question of what constitutes
class and what constitutes the means of pro-
duction. And as I said, it becomes much more
complicated. The clarity of the working class
and the capitalist class gets muddled in urban
situations, but it becomes much more realistic
and much closer to what the politics of daily
life are really about.
PNC: A lot of similar things are happening in
Seoul, and I know you have been meeting people
and going to places to confirm the fact. There is
much more to say about the city and the right to
the city, which I think is an immensely important
topic, but I’d like to move on to something in both
your writings and your remarks yesterday which I
find quite intriguing. You raised the question of
hierarchy in organizing a struggle or an alternative
society. You’d been doing this at some personal
cost because the moment you mention hierarchy
many ecologists and anarchists accuse you of
being a Stalinist or what not. But as you said, deal-
ing with a big ecological problem such as climate
change, you do need some kind of central
authority and some kind of hierarchical set-up.
You can’t have all the small pro-climate or eco-
logical groups running around doing their own
things, only “horizontally networking” among
themselves. And also, I think you said in your
essay “The Nature of Environment” that the ecol-
ogist or anarchist movements that completely
ignore or reject any kind of hierarchy can’t go
on, could even be “life-threatening.”2 In Korea
the notion of social hierarchy is traditionally
more ingrained in people, which makes many
progressive intellectuals find that word anathema.
I myself have brought up this topic and was almost
invariably accused of being a conservative, a reac-
tionary.
DH: Yes, right. Well, you and I are probably
accused of being patriarchal …. Well, we prob-
ably are, to some degree.
This is a very difficult question. I am struck by
the way in which informal networks that exist
right now across the world have gone further
than I thought they could in terms of linking
together activism of various kinds, and I think

we see this particularly among those people I’d
call cultural producers. But they need a coordi-
nating framework in which to operate, and I’m
very impressed with the way they use things like
biennales and other proliferating cultural events
to connect and network, to pull things together.
So I’m very supportive of the idea that let’s push
networking forms and horizontal forms as far as
we possibly can, and I think it’s very possible
they can extend further than I imagined they
could, partly because of their capacity to use
in constructive and collaborative ways the new
social media structures that now exist. So, I
don’t want to give the impression that I think
this horizontal networking framework in
which many people want to cast their politics
is a waste of time at all; in fact, it is very pro-
gressive and I would want to support it.
PNC: Oh yes, absolutely.
DH: It is just that when certain issues come up,
it seems to me that they cannot be handled that
way, such as the question of climate change and
infrastructure production on a large scale. If
there are some benefits that flow from working
at that scale, then how do you do so without
having some sort of hierarchical control and
production structure? The problem is to try to
find hierarchical ways that are democratically
accountable in some way; that seems to me to
be the crux of the problem because there is no
question that some of the hierarchical struc-
tures, once you concentrate power at the sum-
mit of those things, tend to cut off their
accountability to the grassroots, and then
democracy disappears. We see this electorally
when somebody coming up through the social
movements, very democratic, becomes elected
the mayor or something like that, and then sud-
denly they go into a different orbit. We see these
things happening around us, then the typical
view of the grassroots is that they were betrayed
by political power, but I don’t think that is quite
fair although sometimes they do that. This is to
me one of the big organizational issues of our
INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 261
times.
That is why I always liked Murray Bookchin’s
writings on democratic federalism, which is to
have assembly-style decision-making structures
at neighbourhood and local levels, but then to
integrate them into assemblies of assemblies to
address bioregional questions at a broader
scale. So, then, the rationality of using, say,
water in a bioregion is not going to be decided
by individual and local decisions but by the
emergence of agreed upon practices consistent
with bioregional possibilities and needs. In
Bookchin’s system he goes back, I think, to
the Saint-Simonian principle, that when you
get this outer level the main objective is the
management of things, not the management
of people. I think that is a rather interesting
way to try to look at it; I’m not sure how you
can separate the things and people precisely
but I see the intent, which is to say you want
to maximize the freedom of individuals at all
sorts of levels, but in order to do that, certain
physical infrastructures have to be created col-
lectively which allow people to exercise that
freedom in a way that is meaningful. This is
one of the things we need to talk about.
But I have gone on record as saying I get very
distressed about what I call the fetishism of cer-
tain organizational forms of horizontality that
are sacrosanct and cannot be criticized or eval-
uated, even though actually when I get close to
any of these organizations, I see suspicious
forms of hierarchy and secret ways in which
new structures of power get set up.
PNC: I agree we need to develop a more flexible
and realistic principle of organization. But per-
haps, in order to adequately address the ques-
tion of which hierarchies are good or
beneficial and which are not, and how to get
good hierarchies, we should also probe the
notion of equality more deeply and try to dis-
tinguish which equalities are good equalities
and which are not. Please correct me if I am
262 D. HARVEY AND PAIK N.-C.
wrong, but I understand that Marx rarely speaks
of equality as such. He talks about the abolition
of class society, but when he talks about an
alternative vision of life he mainly speaks of a
full development of personality or free associ-
ation of free producers, etc. So, I think that
should help us to liberate from the fetishism
of equality.
DH: Yes, yes. No, I’m not in favour of equality in
many dimensions. I think, I suppose that the
simplest way I could put it is that I am in favour
of equality of life chances, but I’m certainly not
in favour of equality of outcomes. I think that
actually one of the things that makes society
exciting is the production of difference. I don’t
want to see, for example, uneven geographical
development eliminated. I think actually that
uneven geographical development can become
very exciting. I like to go to different spaces of
the city, to places that have a different feel to
them, different textures of daily life, so variety
becomes terribly important. But at some point
we also have to temper that with the idea that
the differences should not be such that in one
part of the city your life chances are much dimin-
ished compared with someone that lives in
another part of the city. You want to set up the
situation where life chances (such as life-expect-
ancy) are guaranteed to everybody but not the
situation where equality of tastes and homogen-
eity of being is mandated. I always find it ironic
that one of the criticism against Marx is that he
would make everything the same, and this criti-
cism comes from a capitalism that is busy mak-
ing everything the same everywhere you look. So
who is busy making everything the same? Actu-
ally, the broad cultural left is the social group
most interested in the preservation of difference,
cultural difference, differences of taste and life
style. I think you are right to say that we should
not fetishize equality.
PNC: Should we go one step farther; from
valorizing diversity that comes from inequality
of results after equal life chances have been
given, shouldn’t we go one step farther and con-
ceptualize some kind of inequality in achieved
wisdom or true competence for living or some-
thing of the sort? I once used the expression
“the hierarchy of wisdom” and that was a very
bad choice.
DH: Oh, yes, you’d be crucified for that.
PNC: Hierarchy is one bad word, and wisdom
in English means more of practical wisdom,
but what I had in mind was wisdom (say) in
the Buddhist sense, the kind of wisdom that
emanates from true enlightenment. Anyway,
that was a very infelicitous expression, but I
haven’t quite hit upon a happy one yet. The
idea is that people should be educated toward
a voluntary submission or acceptance of leader-
ship in situations that call for it, toward persons
who have earned that kind of natural authority,
but not in the sense of meritocracy. The main
problem of meritocracy is that it is defined in
terms of ability to prove competitive within
the existing system, whereas the kind of wisdom
I am talking about is something that can fully
function when we are liberated from all oppres-
sive distinctions or “bad inequalities.”
DH: I wouldn’t put it that way. I wouldn’t want
to go down that particular path. What I did in
the utopian sketch that I put into the end of
Spaces of Hope (2000) was to envisage a situ-
ation where it was not that people have auth-
ority or anything of that kind, but had some
kind of respect for their accomplishments, and
that people who respected somebody’s accom-
plishments might want to learn and study
some of that. So, one of the ideas I had in
there was that everybody should have a sabbati-
cal so that once every seven years they could
drop everything and go somewhere else and
do something different. In that year, if they
were interested in music or something like
that, and there was a great musician they
wanted to go work with, they could go do
that. But it was not a matter of submission or

anything like that, just a desire to acquire cer-
tain skills. I would love to know how to play
the piano; I learned a little bit when I was a
kid and I regret very much that I never took it
up seriously. If I had a sabbatical I might go
off and work with somebody in this kind of
way. I think that what you are maybe talking
about is a certain kind of inequality of achieve-
ment which many people might want to emu-
late; I’d rather think of it not as submission
but rather of emulation, of something which
you very much admire. Of course, it would be
totally voluntary.
PNC: Totally voluntary, to be sure, and not sub-
mission to any kind of fixed authority. The piano
teacher could come to you on her sabbatical and
take lessons from you on reading Capital. But the
point is whether we could conceive of a more
general competence for living, like the Buddhist
notion of practice in the dharma – or in the
Way (dao) as we also say in East Asia. Naturally,
in applying the dharma in various life-situations,
the dharma master needn’t assume the teaching
role on all occasions; in fact, if he or she tried to
do that, it would only cast doubt on the wisdom
and qualifications of the would-be master! But I
realize bringing in Buddhism or the Way may
not be the most effective method of communi-
cating, either. E.P. Thompson’s notion of “edu-
cation of desire” that came up in yesterday’s
session might do better service. You could say
that the “wise” are people who are better edu-
cated in their desire as well as in intellect and
practical abilities. In any case, my point is that
if we are to realize a “good hierarchy,” we should
look for a principle of organization and edu-
cation based on certain “good” inequalities,
beyond just saying that we want both equality
and diversity. That should both meet the practi-
cal needs and allow for an education to propagate
true wisdom, eventually helping to reduce even
the “good” inequalities.
DH: I would tend not to go with that. I think I’d
probably start at the other end of the
INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 263
educational schema. I mentioned yesterday
that I’m very partial to Freire’s Pedagogy of the
Oppressed. That is pedagogy that is about the
liberation people found from certain fetishistic
conceptions, from bad common sense, in the
way that Gramsci defined it, so I think the liber-
ation and emancipation of people from pre-
existing prejudices is important, but once that
process begins, almost anything can happen. It
is like opening doors into the unknown. You
know, “let a thousand flowers bloom” and all
the rest of it. I tend to think of it that way rather
than thinking about some kind of achievement
standard, which I think is implicit in some of
the things you are saying; I would not want to
be responsible for setting up some kind of
achievement standard where I’m saying this
person is really worthy relative to someone
else. I don’t think I’d want to do that.
PNC: Well, you see I’m still searching for a
more felicitous expression. But you mentioned
Marx’s notion of simple reproduction as you
talked about “good infinity.” Simple reproduc-
tion need not necessarily mean absolutely zero
growth, but in order for simple reproduction
rather than compound growth to be the main
consideration, we would not only need a new
social system but an altogether differently edu-
cated citizenry.
DH: Absolutely. Marx’s theory of simple repro-
duction is disrupted entirely by the fact that
profit making becomes the aim of the circula-
tion process of capital. Profit making means
expansion, and that generates the “bad infi-
nities” we are now running into. Compound
growth forever is impossible and starts to create
all kind of stresses – so we have to find a way to
incentivize activity such that people will sustain
simple reproduction of social life without the
profit motive being involved. But that would
require collective consciousness as to the
importance of simple reproduction. Of course,
simple reproduction is perfectly feasible if
you’re thinking, for instance, of simple
264 D. HARVEY AND PAIK N.-C.
reproduction of peasant life. They see people
reproducing themselves, and this is good infin-
ity, a virtuous infinity that allows society to
reproduce itself over the ages. Capitalism
broke with that; it is now about growth all the
time. The incentives that existed within a pea-
sant community, which is attached of course,
usually, to the cycles of what has to be done to
grow the wheat so you’ve got the bread at the
end of the year … all those kinds of things
which are incentivized within the social struc-
ture; somehow or other we have to incentivize
activities in such a way that we reproduce a
complex society. That, then, makes it very diffi-
cult to do when all the time people are thinking
in terms of individualist success. So we have to
undermine individualism, we have to under-
mine the profit motive, we have to find the
social way in which people can be incentivized
to do enough work so that society can repro-
duce.
And, you’re right, this is going to take a major
change of consciousness. People say, well, that
is impossible, but then I say to them that I
have lived through the neoliberal era and I’ve
seen the consciousness of populations change
over the last 30 or 40 years as I’m sure you
have. It is not impossible for consciousness to
change, but it is just a long and drawn out pro-
cess. We are all neoliberal now in a way that
would have been unthinkable in the 1970s. So
things can change and in a dramatic way. One
of the things that has been so interesting
about being in China is that everybody in
China seems convinced that things can change.
For all the things that may go on that you can
criticize in China, there is an atmosphere that
we know that things can change, and they can
change very quickly, and they are changing
very quickly. And they can change for the bet-
ter, and what has happened in China, for the
most people, has indeed been for the better.
PNC: Let’s come back to the topic of capital in
its present state. You said the capitalist class is
now in utter disarray, they really don’t know
how to deal with these economic crises, politics
is simply insane; you cited at the workshop the
Trump candidacy in the US and the forthcom-
ing Brexit referendum in the UK. I’d say almost
the same thing about today’s South Korea. Of
course, one difference in South Korea from
other countries is that we are part of a divided
peninsula; what I call the division system
works as a kind of prop for the capitalist system
in the south and the so-called socialist system in
the north, too. But even that is in serious crisis,
in my opinion. South Korean politics is insane
at the moment, but what we do have in com-
mon with the Chinese is that Koreans have
seen many changes and changes for the better,
and we still haven’t entirely lost confidence
that we may change for the better. This is a sub-
stantial difference between South Korea and I’d
say Japan. Even in Japan, people are waking up
now and getting so angry and starting to move.
But moving on to the United States and Europe,
you said that they have really lost control. Does
it mean that the neoliberal prescription they
produced after the crisis in 1973 has lost its effi-
cacy?
DH: Well, it depends upon how you interpret
neoliberal prescription. My impression all
along was that it was a class project, to recuper-
ate and centralize power in an oligarchy. I think
that class project is alive and well. What strikes
me as quite astonishing is that if you look at the
1930s, the 1930s provoked a great deal of
thought and argument about whether we can
create an alternative system to the one we
have or not. The role of the state can change,
the management of the economy can be chan-
ged, Keynesian economic theory suddenly
became possible. So, the crisis provoked a trans-
formation of mental conceptions about how to
deal with a capitalism that had obviously gone
badly wrong. This new way of thinking and
the new political practice turned out to be
quite successful in capitalist terms in the period
after 1945. Then back into crisis in the 1970s,

again a period of soul searching, new theories
come along, Keynes is rejected, supply-side
economics comes in, power structures shift,
institutions change, mentalities start to shift
…. So a new answer (one that I did not like)
was worked out, again in capitalist terms,
during the 1970s.
But what strikes me is that since 2008 I don’t see
any of that soul-searching happening. If you look
at what political power is doing, it is simply still
administering the same kind of nostrums as it
was doing before, with a few wrinkles here and
there. The one exception here is the China-led
expansion, which is not strictly speaking Keyne-
sian but is very similar to what the US did after
1945. But there is no real new thinking coming
out, and no new prescriptions. Maybe there are
some things going on somewhere that I am una-
ware of. But I just don’t see the ferment, discus-
sion, debate going on. All I see is the
International Monetary Fund issuing another
dire prediction and following the same structural
adjustment policies. This comes back to one of
my main criticisms these days, that everybody
is interested in how things happen, not why
they happen. So the IMF is now saying that the
US economy is heading for troubled waters, the
labour participation rate is going down, the pro-
ductivity rate is very low, the middle class is dis-
appearing … This is a very pessimistic outlook
and yet there is no suggestion as to why this is
happening and what should be done about it,
how the whole economy can be reconfigured.
With the China economy not exactly falling
into recession but losing its dynamism, I think
global capitalism is in a lot of trouble. The only
thing you can do is keep expanding the money
supply. The world’s central banks are adding
zeros to the world’s money supply, as if somehow
this solves the problem. Talk about “bad infinity!”
That is really bad infinity because you can always
add zeros to the world’s money supply, and that is
effectively the only answer they’ve got right now.
So, I’m very astonished that there is not more of a
combative attempt to think through and
INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 265
transform the economic system … Neoliberal
orthodoxy in economics is alive and well and as
strong as ever, universities are being increasingly
taken over by neoliberal corporate structures.
Where is the new thinking going to come from?
PNC: On the other hand, I think the ideology of
neoliberalism has really lost its lustre after 2008.
DH: I think that its legitimacy has been under-
mined but not its practices. But you can see
what has replaced its legitimacy, which is
authoritarian militarized control of any real
struggle to change the world. Neoliberalism
may have lost its legitimacy but it has acquired
the power of defining any opposition to it as ter-
rorism requiring a militarized response.
PNC: In South Korea I’ve been critical of many
of my progressive colleagues who like to throw
around this term neoliberalism. For example,
they completely disregard the mediating role
of the peninsula’s division system; the global
neoliberal practice does apply to Korea, but
this is sometimes aggravated or distorted by
the fact of the north–south division and con-
frontation. But I’m in sympathy with your diag-
nosis of neoliberalism as a project of asset
transfer that is still very much alive and well. I
myself have called neoliberalism “capitalism
without its human mask”; they used to talk
about capitalism with a human face, but they
don’t do so much anymore.
DH: Yes, I’ve noticed that that has gone.
PNC: My point it that the so-called human face
of capitalism probably always was a human
mask, though many did persuade themselves it
was a real face.
DH: There are attempts to re-create the mask,
such as, the notion of the sharing economy, the
ethical economy. There is a little programme
going on somewhere right now but these are
not very successful.
266 D. HARVEY AND PAIK N.-C.
PNC: Leaders of the capitalist class in the early
1970s seem to have decided to throw off the
masks and go back to a rather primitive or bar-
baric capitalism.
DH: Go back to the practices described in
Volume I of Capital. That is what they did.
PNC: Volume I of Capital, including the chap-
ter on primitive accumulation.
DH: Yes, absolutely.
PNC: But at the same time, I think “neoliberal-
ism” is arguably another mask, because both
“neo” (or “new”) and “liberalism” are, in a
sense, positive terms; each has some attraction
for a lot of people. But neoliberalism is neither
really new, because it goes back to the days
before capitalism managed to merge with
some kind of democracy, even social democ-
racy; nor is it liberalism in the true sense,
because liberalism originally meant the liberty
of individuals and individual entrepreneurs,
not the liberty of legal persons, not the big cor-
porations who are the chief beneficiaries of the
liberties of neoliberalism. So, we have a new
mask, but as we are saying, even the new
mask has become more or less tattered since
2008.
DH: This, by the way, is why I call myself anti-
capitalist. I’m not anti-neoliberal. A lot of
people are anti-neoliberal but not anti-capital-
ist. I think it is more important to be anti-capi-
talist.
PNC: In other words, another problem with
focusing too much on neoliberalism is that it
really masks the reality of capitalism.
DH: Yes, I agree.
PNC: When you mentioned the figure of China
riding the tiger or holding on to its tail, I
remarked much depended on how healthy the
tiger is, how much longer it is expected to live.
If the capitalist class in the European and Amer-
ican centre is in such disarray and has lost con-
trol, then doesn’t the Chinese effort to combine
the territorial logic with the capitalist logic in
their own way have more potential than one
might recognize? I mean, they have not shown
a new road as they claim to in their slogan of
“socialism with Chinese characteristics”; to the
contrary they have joined the new neoliberal
global order. But at the same time they are car-
rying out some kind of rearguard action to
defend the quasi-social democratic – well, a
somewhat different kind of capitalism at any
rate, and to some extent their own revolutionary
legacies. China is such a huge country. Of
course, in territorial size China is not that
much bigger than the United States or Canada,
and smaller than Russia, but given its large
population and long history, it contains so
many of what you’ve called “heterotopic”
elements, so even a kind of holding action
could preserve many potentialities that may
finally come to fruition when this tiger finally
collapses.
At our journals conference a Chinese intellec-
tual named Sun Ge, a professor at the Chinese
Social Science Academy, said that people talk
about China as if it is a fully matured nation
state, but that’s not the case, and one doesn’t
quite know yet what it is or what it will turn
out to be. And I think she has a point. Natu-
rally, on the international stage it acts as a
powerful nation state, but inside China it
seems a mixture of the old empire, the modern
nation state, and also many other things, you
don’t know what. A lot depends on whether
China in fact manages to become a fully
mature nation state, which in my view will
have disastrous consequences in terms of
both regional harmony and global ecology,
for which you expressed concern as in the
case of huge investments China has recently
been making all over the world. In any case
I tend to believe there are enough complexities

within China which they can use, provided
they can hold on to the tiger’s tail long enough
without being devoured.
DH: Isn’t this, wouldn’t this also be true, and
certainly has been true, in the United States?
In the American South, with its legacy of slavery
and its particular history of race relations, very
different, and the American West. Regionalism
in the United States has also been a very impor-
tant element. And I think, if I look at what many
people in the financial press look to these days,
the big rival to China is India, because the
Indian wage-labour force is growing at a faster
rate …. China is running into some demo-
graphic problems, geopolitically, and is even
offshoring some of its activities to Bangladesh,
Vietnam, Cambodia, and so on. So the inte-
gration of India into global financial systems
is rather a tense moment.
So when I am pessimistic about the future of
infinite growth I’m very pessimistic over a
long haul, and I’m not going to argue that in
the short run there aren’t places that will man-
age to pull themselves through by “holding on
to the tail … ” and provide a good deal of
energy to the tiger they are holding onto, and
I think China has done that in relation to glo-
bal capitalism over the period since 2008. They
in effect saved capitalism from a global col-
lapse. I don’t think this was the intent, by
any means, of the ruling party in China, but
that is what, in effect, they did. Whether they
can continue to do so is the big question. So,
I do insist we look at the relationship between
their territorial logic and the logic of capital
accumulation, to which to some degree their
territorial logic has become subservient. The
perpetuation of their territorial logic depends
upon them managing the capitalist logic in
ways that are advantageous to them. Whether
this will benefit capitalism as a whole is an
open question. The same is going on in India
right now. India has a vast population which
is growing very rapidly. There is undoubtedly
INTER-ASIA CULTURAL STUDIES 267
a very vicious process of primitive accumu-
lation going on in India … the destruction of
peasant society, which to some degree we’ve
also been seeing in China, that is not complete.
We’re dealing with a global economy where
there are these, what we might call, these two
prime energy sources from which future capital
accumulation can draw, but in drawing that
out they will have to negotiate between their
own territorial logic. But, of course, how this
is going to work out in this relationship
between the territorial logic and the capitalist
logic, I don’t know; I’d want to look at those
two things going on and try to analyse and
understand the dynamics of that relation as it
goes forward. And, as I said, I’d like to, from
the global capitalist standpoint.
PNC: Well, I don’t see that regional diversity in
the United States can be compared to that in
China—
DH: Not now, but if you look at 1945 I think
you would say—
PNC: Even in 1945 I would disagree because,
to cite a very simple but striking instance,
even Chinese people in not too distant
localities don’t understand among themselves
when they speak their own dialects. There is
a Chinese writer, novelist, a very good one
named Han Shaogong whom I met in Seoul.
He is from Hunan Province, which as you
know is Mao Zedong’s home province, and
during the Cultural Revolution he was sent
down to the countryside in the same province
and he couldn’t understand what people were
saying. That kind of diversity doesn’t exist in
the United States, because there hasn’t been
enough time for the white settlers to produce
that kind of regional and linguistic diversity.
India is more comparable in that respect. On
the other hand, I think the crucial difference
between India and China is that China did
go through a socialist revolution; it didn’t pro-
duce a real socialist society, but a unique
268 D. HARVEY AND PAIK N.-C.
legacy of collective experience. So I think a lot
depends on what the Chinese make of that
legacy. Unlike Russia, the Chinese leadership
has not formally disowned their revolutionary
legacy, although I don’t think even in Russia
the legacies of the Bolshevik Revolution have
entirely gone away. But India has rich anti-
capitalist legacies of its own, including a col-
lective experience at the state government
level, so we will see what kind of use they
make of them.
But I am afraid it’s time for us to bring this
discussion to an end. But before asking you
to wrap up, I want to say that what you call
historical-geographical materialism seems to
me nothing but “good sense” in Gramsci’s
definition, and I wish to thank you for energiz-
ing that good sense among us through your
visit. It’ll now be our turn to make it as
much of “common sense” in Korea as possible.
DH: Part of the reason that I like to talk in
terms of historical-geographical materialism is
to try to take account of diversity and difference,
including at the linguistic level, which you
rightly point out, without letting go of the con-
tradictory unities (to use Marx’s language) that
bind us together and which make it possible to
at least think about the global commons which
we all inhabit. Someone said once that the two
greatest global commons that we have are the
land and language and here I am in conversa-
tion in a different land with people who work
and think in a different language and yet com-
munication is possible. So I want to thank you
for this privileged opportunity to talk with you
across those divides and to congratulate you,
the publishing house and the journal on your
substantial achievements and contributions
over the last 50 years.
PNC: Thank you very much. We’ll stop here.
Notes
1. “The ‘New’ Imperialism” in Harvey (2016,
259).
2. See Harvey (2016, 206).
Acknowledgement
The conversation was recorded at Changbi-Seogyo
Building, Seoul, 23 June 2016, and transcribed by
Lisa Kim Davis.
Notes on contributors
David Harvey earned his PhD from Cambridge Uni-
versity and is currently Professor of Anthropology
and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York. He was formerly professor
of geography at Johns Hopkins, and Halford Mack-
inder Professor of Geography at Oxford. His close
studies of Marx’s works and his reflections on the
importance of place (and more recently “nature”)
have received much attention and acclaim across
the humanities and social sciences. His highly influ-
ential books include Rebel Cities: From the Right to
the City to the Urban Revolution (2013); Social Justice
and the City (2009); A Brief History of Neoliberalism
(2005); The New Imperialism (2005), among others.
Paik Nak-chung, a literary critic, received a PhD in
English Literature at Harvard University. He taught
at Seoul National University until his retirement in
2003. In 1966 he founded the Korean literary-intel-
lectual journal The Changbi Quarterly, remaining
its editor for 50 years. He has been active in South
Korea’s democracy movement and in the civilian
endeavours to promote reconciliation between the
two Koreas. He authored many volumes of literary
and social criticism, with three collections translated
into Chinese and one into English. Currently he is
co-chair of the Korea Peace Forum as well as an
emeritus professor at Seoul National University.
Reference
Harvey, David. 2016. The Ways of the World.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.