The full interview with Prof. David Harvey is in the second issue of Irish Left Review. Part one has already been published in Red Pepper, but the second part is now available on the Irish Left Review site. It includes a discussion about NAMA, class consciousness and the need to think about the urban when considering what constitutes the working class. Thanks to Ronan Burtenshaw and Aubrey Robinson for the interview. irishleftreview.org/2013/11/04/interview-prof-david-harvey/ Q. One of the reasons why this year is important to the Irish Left is that it is the centenary of the Dublin Lockout. That struggle was built upon a very clear class consciousness, which those engaged in left-wing politics today don’t enjoy. Is there a crisis of class consciousness at the moment? How might we address talking about or organising around class to revitalise it? DH. The traditional way of thinking about class has always been to think about factory labour. During the industrial era factory labour was critical in terms of the creation of class consciousness and organisation. The Left has celebrated, in a way, the factory labourer as the centre of its critical consciousness and politics. We now face the problem that factory labour has largely disappeared in many parts of the world. It is still there in Bangladesh – what has been happening in factories there is similar to the Triangle Fire in New York in 1911 – the suicides in the factories in China and so on. You could take all of those things and put them in Marx’s chapter on the working day in volume one of Capital. You wouldn’t know the difference. Nineteenth century capitalism is still a very strong presence in the world – it is just not here in the UK, Ireland, the United States in the same way it was thirty or forty years ago. As a result of that I think the concept of the working-class has to be revised. I was never happy with this concentration on factory labour, partly because of my urban interests. I ask questions like, ‘where did the Paris Commune come from?’ It was an urban event. People wanted to get their city back. You look historically and 1848 was about people wanting to get their city back as much as it was about the factories. The same in 1919 in Seattle. Then there’s 1968 – which was to do with Paris, Bangkok, Mexico City. If you look historically the city has always been the site of political activism. - See more at: irishleftreview.org/#sthash.kmeVKvY1.dpuf
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 09:07:47 +0000
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