Automação, revolução e pós-capitalismo | DAVID HARVEY

Foucault kind of said you know the problem about fascism is not the fascism out there it's the fascism in our heads and I think it's the neoliberalism in our heads that's a very serious kind of problem and the only way that's going to change is by building an alternative life in which political subjectivity is also change [Music] [Applause] revolution is a transition which occurs in time and space in which people move from one way of collective provision to an alternative mode of collective provision with I think the aim at a certain point of liberating people

as much as possible so that the maximum amount of free time is available to people so that's my general kind of position how that is done it can't be done overnight tonight I think that it's something that it's gonna be a long practice because it's gonna change have to be reliant upon the change of mental capacities and ways of thinking and political subjectivity we've been through 40 years of inculcation of neoliberal ways of thinking and we all of us and their liberal in the sense of that way of thinking is kind of so deeply embedded

now that's gonna take a lot of times get it out I mean this what went well and Foucault kind of said you know the problem about fascism is not the fascism out there it's the fascism in our heads and I think it's the neoliberalism in our heads that's a very serious kind of problem and the only way that's going to change is by building an alternative life in which political subjectivity is also change so there's no longer individualistic and competitive but is kind of social and mutually supportive and therefore therefore has a stability that doesn't

exist in contemporary world so the transformation of mental capacities is a long-standing process and I you know and again I would appeal to what I've lived through I lived through the neoliberal revolution I remember time when we thought differently about the world but now after 30 or 40 years all of us think differently and so yeah Margaret Thatcher was right when she said my mission is to change the mentalities and the soul and the way of thinking and and and she said I'm the real revolutionary here and and in a way she was but but

in my view that was a counter-revolution people but if you can have a counter revolutionary movement then you can have another revolutionary movement it and go with it [Music] when people in the Silicon Valley and you know followed by some people on the left like Paul Mason I'm a poor Mason start talking about post-capitalist society I mean first capital society is one to me in which the class relation and the class woman domination which currently exists has been abolished and I don't see anything going on to abolish that class relation and that doing class structures

of domination I see technologies which artificial intelligence and things like that which are changing job structures and which can in fact lead to what what happened in the manufacturing sector which was the industrialization is about to happen to service sector so yeah there's going to be some major restructuring and the divisions of labor the division of job opportunities and things of that kind yes that's they're all there but capitalism has done this again and again and again throughout its history and to imagine that somehow or other this means we're going to be post capitalists he's

crazy so I think that on the one hand you know Silicon Valley sort of talk of a post-capitalist society is nonsense and but at the same time the left can't say well actually I want the factory labor back because I want the factories to open up so there can be a proletariat that can be political I mean that's crazy too so so you know I I think we have to actually adapt our politics to the current state of capital accumulation and what is going on within within that world and so will one of you those

post-capitalist we will be outside of the circulation of interest-bearing capital that would be abolished circulation of capital would be abolished the class relations would be abolished well we're nowhere near that and I don't see anything in this on the short term which is going on you know a politics which is going to lead to that abolition [Music] yeah I mean it's interesting who's into promoting universal basic income there's a left version of it and some of it is connected to the sort of Italian autonomist tradition but Silicon Valley cloud of entrepreneurs is very much into

promoting it because I see artificial intelligence destroying old job opportunities and therefore there's no market to which they're going to be able to sell that product so ubi then becomes a kind of almost a Keynesian sort of stabilizer I think I think the problem with with ubi is again it's one of these single bullet things then if you fire it you don't know what the consequences are going to be and I fear very much that if you introduce ubi not only do you you know destroy access to a meaningful jobs and all the rest of

it to actually simply create a passive income stream which has no has no purpose other than some sort of consumerism and I think that if you bi is connected to some form of productive and gainful and you know activities and employment then it seems to me well this is this this would then have some possibilities but against one of those things that if mental conceptions don't change and and if the credit system doesn't change and if all the other features of contemporary life remain the same and you simply inject ubi it's just going to be

absorbed into the capitalist dynamic without any impact upon class relations social relations and and the like in addition to which you know the right-wing complaint that this will just lead to so dependency is to some degree I think correct that if if you have ubi then you know why would people bother with anything depending upon its level of course and the likelihood of it being at a level which would guarantee an adequate lifestyle as opposed to just a southern minimum I'm so I'm very skeptical about the UVI initiative I'm not I know I'm 100 percent

opposed to it but and it has to be embedded in something else it has to be part of a much broader political project [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music]