David Harvey--in Bolivia and on Bolivia. Though he is understandably very cautious about his critique of Bolivia and the buen vivir Left (he is, after all, sitting in front of the wipala!) his analysis is still very on-point. grande harvey! Heres a transcribed excerpt (starting around 16:00): We need to rethink what the nature of the anti-capitalist program should be about. And I don’t think that is yet clear to enough of mass forces on the left as to what it really means to be anti-capitalist, and what it would take to be anti-capitalist. I think we need to think that through much more clearly... For certain people ‘buen vivir’ [living well] means having an automobile, a shopping mall, and living in a gated community. To me that is a capitalist form of urbanization, which I think is not conducive to equality, egalitarianism, it’s not comfortable at all with socialist values. So to me I think that we have to be very clear as to what kinds of transformations would be required to turn this general notion of ‘buen vivir’—which actually is a rather empty notion until you’ve turned it into something on the ground—into something which is more consistent with what a socialist ethic would look like... And this issue, for example, which is: Is a society most concerned with delivering use values to people, so that they may live a decent life, or is it concerned to actually monetize everything, to commodify everything, and to presume that a market system can in fact deliver the goods? Right now, one of the big problem [globally] is that you have institutions, and also kind of a program, which is trying to make out that capitalism can be a reasonable and ethical system, so that we have kind of a mask being created—and a lot of this is located in the NGO movements and the philanthropic movements and if you look at the big philanthropy movements with Soros and the Gates Foundation—in many respects, there’s an attempt to re-brand capitalism as having the capacity to be a “good” form of capitalism, and I’m very very skeptical about that.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 20:37:20 +0000
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