Patnaik vs. Harvey - Imperialism Is it Still a Relevant Concept, The New School TRANSCRIPT

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Imperialism: Is it Still a Relevant Concept? | The New School Event held: 1 May 2017, Published 11 May 2017

Contents 9:21 Prabhat Patnaik: ..........................................................................................................................1 58:41 David Harvey: ............................................................................................................................ 5 1:25:36 Prabhat Patnaik:.................................................................................................................. 10 1:35:56 David Harvey:...................................................................................................................... 12 1:57:46 David Harvey:...................................................................................................................... 13 2:00:00 Prabhat Patnaik:.................................................................................................................. 14

9:21 Prabhat Patnaik: I'm very grateful for this opportunity to speak on a subject as important as this, and the fact that our book is being discussed. I suppose the answer to the question [of] whether imperialism is relevant today or not obviously depends upon what one means by imperialism. I should make it very clear that I do not mean by imperialism, one country, or a set of countries, oppressing another set of countries, I do not mean by imperialism, the fact that some entity oppresses some other entity in a particularly intensified manner, I see it as a relationship which underlies capitalism, and a relationship which has characterised capitalism for a very long time. In other words, I see imperialism as underlying the colonial phase of capitalism, I also see imperialism as underlying the contemporary phase of capitalism. Now when we come to this relationship almost everybody talks about, or is aware of, or discusses the role of oil in the relationship that exists between Metropolitan capital and a lot of other outlying regions, but oil as Alfred Marshall would have put it, is in fact just a leading species of a large genus, and it is this large genus that I really want to concentrate on. Because otherwise we would think of imperialism as basically a set of episodes or at the most something which characterises relationship with the Middle East, but not necessarily with people in general in the third world, now to get at this relationship therefore I would like to first say that this large genus is one which arises from the fact that capitalism requires a number of commodities which basically have three characteristics. The first is that it cannot do without them, they are absolutely essential. The second is that it cannot produced them, either because their production is not possible here, or alternatively their production, which is possible here, is insufficient for the requirements of capital, and that being the case, you find, therefore, that capitalism perforce has to rely upon supplies of these commodities, which are absolutely essential, from other places, 1

from outside its frontiers, from the outlying regions, and again, when I say frontiers, I do not just mean frontiers in a geographical sense, but outside its social frontiers. And the third thing is that many of these commodities are subject to what economists call increasing supply price, namely these commodities, in whose case, for any given level of money wages, or money incomes of the producers, you find, that as capital accumulates, you'd find the cost of production, or the cost of supplies of these commodities would go on increasing. The classic example of a thing like this, which we treat in our book, which I think is very important is of course, tropical, and subtropical land. There are a large number of crops produced in tropical and subtropical land which are required by capital, required as raw materials, required as foodstuffs and so on, by capitalism. At the same time, these [raw materials], by their very nature, cannot be produced within the confines of the boundaries of where capitalism developed, or where capitalism predominantly resides, even to this day. Either they’re [raw materials] simply not producible or alternatively even if they’re producible in certain seasons, they're not producible in other seasons, when for supplies of these, you'd have to rely upon imports from other places, particularly tropical and sub tropical regions, from where these commodities have to be obtained. And thirdly, these are commodities even if the producible here of course for additional I mean the domestic production is not sufficient you have to rely upon outside supplies and certainly as I said these are commodities which are subject to increasing supply price the amount of tropical and subtropical land that is available for producing these commodities is necessarily limited it is true that you could have land augmenting investment and technical progress, irrigation for instance which makes possible multiple quadruple cropping but on the other hand, many of these kinds of measures, of land augmentation are measures that require substantial state involvement. You may recollect that Marx had said that countries like India traditionally had governments in which the only three major ministries, the ministry of revenue, which means plundering from your own people, the ministry of war, which means plundering from others, and the ministry of irrigation, which actually made possible this entire edifice of empires to survive, and of course on the basis of which Karl Wittfogel developed a whole theory of Oriental Despotism. So, the point is that this requires state involvement and state involvement in the era of capitalism is typically frowned upon unless the state involvement is in favour of capital so state involvement that would actually raise peasant production peasant incomes is something that capitalism typically opposes and of course it does so on the basis of principles of sound finance on the basis of austerity on the basis of various such things which characterise the gold standard. And they also characterise the contemporary. Therefore, we have a situation where land augmentation is something which is rather limited, secondly you have a situation, therefore, when growing capital accumulation would really require pressure on this land if these commodities have to be obtained. And therefore they can be obtained at an increasing supply price. Now this itself is not a new idea David Ricardo talked about it, Keynes in his economic consequences in the peace talked about it, so you have a situation where Ricardo for instance analysed increasing supply price which arose because of what he called diminishing returns misleadingly but on the other hand because of that he basically 2

visualised the situation where capital accumulation would be increasingly getting thwarted ultimately the economy moving towards a stationary state. Now I believe there is a fundamental problem with the Ricardian analysis and that problem arose from the following, he thought that if you have certain commodities which are subject to increasing supply price because of what he called diminishing returns in that case you would simply have a gradual transition towards a stationary state and the terms of trade between those commodities which are subject to increasing supply price in the other commodities would be moving in favour of the former over time. Now if the terms of trade move in favour of the former that basically means the prices of those commodities would be rising for given money wages. If the prices of those commodities are rising in that case money itself is something which people would progressively cease to hold. In fact, if there is a complete confidence that some commodities are going to have their prices rising in money terms, then money would cease to be a medium in which wealth is held, people would move to holding commodities the value of money would collapse, and consequently a monetary system would be impossible to sustain. So long before the Ricardian stationary state is reached, in fact the system would have collapsed. Obviously therefore the logic of capitalism requires that there must be something that prevents the increasing supply price generated tendency, for the money prices of certain commodities to rise, to be kept in check. Now I think they're basically two ways this can be done. One, is firstly of course these commodities have to be open to trade, it must be the case that international demand, purchasing power of the Metropolitan capitalist economies, is something which must be allowed to elicit supplies from these lands, so they must be opened up to trade. Secondly even when they are opened up to trade, if you have increasing supply price their prices would rise but of course if along with the rise in prices you could actually have a depreciation in their exchange rates vis-à-vis Metropolitan currencies, then the prices in the metropolis should not increase. In other words, you may have it 10% rise in some scarce tropical crop price but on the other hand if you have a 10% depreciation the exchange rate, then of course, there is no reason why there should be any increase, in the cost of production, as far as in metropolis is concerned. Now this however can occur only in a world in which capital is freely mobile across frontiers, because then when there's a rise in price, then you'd find that people who have access to finance, would anticipate a fall in exchange rates, shift their money out, and as they shift their money out, the exchange rate would actually fall. And consequently, there would be no increase in costs for the metropolis. So the first requirement is that these regions must be open to trade. Secondly these regions must be open to financial flows but even that may not be enough to ward off as we argue in the book, the threat to the value of money because additionally you would require something more, and that something more, which has always historically characterised capitalism, vis-à-vis these peasant/petty producers, typically producing these commodities in outlying regions, is what we call an income deflation. If it is the case that you can deflate their incomes so that the local demand for these commodities is suppressed, then even as you have capital accumulation even without an 3

increase in output you can actually have larger absorptions for the requirements of the metropolis. So a regime in which there has to be an openness to trade, that is introduced in all these regions, and openness to free capital flows as introduced in all these regions, and additionally a means of exercising income deflation on these regions, particularly on the producers of these kinds of commodities, is something which I believe is essential for a functioning of a capitalist economy, which is endowed with a monetary system, capitalism as you know is very important, it’s a money using economy, pre-eminently, and then and therefore very important for the value of money to be preserved. A regime of this kind characterised by these features is essential for the preservation the value of money. Now colonialism actually achieved that because colonialism on the one and meant the encroachment of Metropolitan goods on a whole range of these economies where petty producers were displaced and dispossessed as a result. Ipso facto their incomes went down, there was an income deflation, and what is more, colonialism achieved it also, through a system of colonial taxes, which was then used to buy commodities for the metropolis, and taken away gratis, because effectively those taxes were used to purchase the commodities, and take them over to the metropolis. Now this is a really significant factor underlying the diffusion of capitalism all over the world because you found that colonial taxes, or what is what in Indian economic nationalist writings was called the ‘drain’ of surplus from the colonies, was then used to finance capital exports from Metropolitan economies. And it is interesting that the same countries to which capital was being exported, were countries with which Britain, for instance, the leading capitalist power at the time, not only had a capital account deficit, which is the way capital exports take place, but also a current account deficit which is very unusual. But even after colonialism was over, there was a period of dirigiste economic regimes in much of the third world, which is more-or-less coterminous with the tropical and subtropical regions of the world, during which there was some difference. You had a situation for instance, when income deflation was stopped, when you actually had land augmenting investment, and technological progress introduced: the green revolution, spread of irrigation and so on, and therefore, there was a substantial increase in peasant incomes, but interestingly that actually came to an end around the early 1970s. How little this whole issue is understood of income deflation, or I should say when that came to an end, then of course you had the development of a new kind of a regime, that regime being the regime of globalisation with neoliberal economic policies, whose main role is to introduce exactly the same phenomena of openness to trade, openness to capital flows, and of course a domestic income deflation which is imposed because of the pressure on the governments to cut back expenditures and so on. How little this essentiality of income deflation is understood in much of the economic literature is something which I shall illustrate by giving just one example. There is an article which was written by no less than Paul Krugman who actually argued that look between 1972 and 1975 there was a rise in all these prices but of course that was controlled because of the increase in supplies. New lands came in, new oil, things were found etc. This would suggest that it was supply adjustment as a matter of fact if you compare the period of 1980 let us say, the triennium around 1980, with the triennium around 2000. Taking the world as a whole, the world foodgrain output per capita declined, the world cereal output per capital declined. 4

You would have thought that this decline would be associated with the rising prices, and therefore a shift in terms of trade in favour of foodgrains, but during that period, the terms of trade between cereals and manufacturers, declined for cereals by 46%. Now obviously therefore there is a drastic income deflation that was being introduced. Of course, to some extent that was reversed earlier this century, but once more, after around 2013, we once more have a remarkable drop as far as the terms of trade are concerned. The story which I want to emphasise is precisely this, that we actually have now in place a regime which is familiar to us from the colonial days, which is reminiscent of the colonial regime, and that regime is one, which not only opens up all these lands, to the pull of the demand from the international economy, opens up all these regions to free capital flows, and imposes income deflation through a whole lot of fiscal measures, which are then imposed on these countries as part of the globalisation process. I see imperialism as a relationship which arises and is sustained by regimes of that kind and I see it as essential for sustaining the value of money. Now the fact that capitalism today is much more complex than in the colonial period, the fact that you have this enormous architecture of finance, which is superimposed on top of the earlier capitalism, is something which far from weakening my argument should strengthen this argument, because when you have this enormous architecture of finance, preserving the value of money becomes extremely essential. In fact, there is a story in Hindu mythology where they believe that the entire world is sustained on the back of a turtle. Now even if the world becomes larger, it still, according to that mythology would be sustained in the back of the turtle, except the turtle would be groaning more and more. That is exactly what is happening to large segments of the peasantry in large parts of 3rd world, in India where I know 300,000 peasants have committed suicide over the last 15 years and I believe the relationship of imperialism is essential for explaining that. Thank you.

58:30 David Harvey: I have a lot of disagreements with Prabhat. This being a commercial occasion, I’m not going to talk about them so you’ll have to read the book and buy it, except by now it’s already freely available on a Russian website with pdf… My disagreements partly stem from the fact that I'm a geographer, and as a geographer I'm interested in where things happen, and where things go to, and the flows and intricate movements of capital, in and around the world. When I used to teach a course on intro to geography, to undergraduates, I used to begin with the question where does your breakfast come from? And I used to take that, and after about 3 days of this, the students would get up and say, ‘I didn't have breakfast this morning’, which of course is precisely my point, that they would starve, without having actually that whole network of all sorts of flows coming from all over the world, millions of people involved in just putting something like a breakfast on your table. So, where it comes from and where it goes to is, I think terribly important. I found Prabhat’s book far too crude about things like that, far too general and not asking it seems to me the 5

very specific questions about where things happen. Just to give you a taste of that, his example of foodgrains that he used, well one of the biggest producers and exporters of foodgrains in the world is the United States, and of course agri-business is highly subsidised, one of the main exporters of cotton, in the world is the United States, and it's all very well to talk about the tropics and subtropics, but part of the United States is in the subtropics, so orange juice actually gets exported from the United States. So when you have something like that happening it seems to me that you can't sort of simply take a crop configuration like foodgrains and stick it on top of the world and say ‘it's all due to that area in this kind of way’. And of course, there are different foodgrains, I don't know whether soybeans is a foodgrain but most of Latin America has been converted, in the case of about 15 years, into one vast soybean plantation. But who's it producing it for? Not for the United States because the United States exports soybeans. Who's taking it? China is taking it. China is the big market for it, so is China an imperialist power? These are the sorts of questions that immediately come to mind, simply by looking at the geography of where something is produced and where it goes. And then of course things have got much more complicated. And I think we have to take account of the complications. I'm also as well as a geographer, I sort of read my Marx and if you read the wonderful letter that Marx wrote to Ann Coffen[??], I think it was 1847 or something like that when he's commenting on Proudhon’s book. And he kind of says basically you know, we always have to be prepared to adjust our categories according to the historical transformations that are occurring, and that as divisions of labour change and as productive forces change, and as social relations change, and all the rest of it, then we have to be prepared to change, what it is we're talking about. And one of the problems I have with many people on the left is there very reluctant to actually pursue those changes. I think imperialism was an obviously relevant term to what was going on in the 19th century. It continued in a different form, with indirect rules/structures, which began to emerge at the end of the 19th century, and then we had the period of decolonization after 1945, and as many people have mentioned in the 1970s things started to change all over again. One of the big changes that occurred in the 1970s was you could actually create a global car. You could manufacture the engines of a car in Brazil, the hubcaps could come from Mexico, it could be assembled in Detroit, and actually a lot of production processes have exactly that kind of character. Furthermore, it became more and more evident to me that, where value is produced is not necessarily the same place where it's realised. For instance, I read the Financial Times and it tells me that the profit rate on Foxconn in Shenzhen is 3%, the profit rate on Apple computers is 28%, and of course Apple computers are realising that in the United States, so value produced in China is being realised in the United States. Now Apple will claim it does design and other functions, so actually it's not quite true that all the value is produced in China, and then when you kind of actually look at, all of the, you know, the chips that are in the computer, they are not produced in Shenzhen either, so you've got a whole kind of quite a set of questions here, as to where is what happening, and where the value is being created, and where it's being extracted, and this is a very complicated kind of question, and I think particularly since the 1970s has become more and more complicated. 6

For that reason, I increasingly was drawn to the idea that it was not didn't make sense to try to cram all of this into some concept, you know, universal concept of imperialism. Unquestionably there are redistributions of value going on, and they’re geographical, but they're complicated, very complicated. And therefore, we have to come up with a new way of looking at it, and to simply put it into the straitjacket of imperialism was going to lose something. So, when I when I was partly persuaded this because in 1974 or somewhere like that Giovanni Arrighi wrote a book called the Geometry of Imperialism. You would expect from his title that this would be about imperialism and since I was a geographer and geometry and geography sort of go together, I was looking for great enlightenment of it, but actually, it’s mainly a book saying the concept of imperialism doesn't work. Actually, what you really need to do is to look at shifting hegemonic configurations of political and economic power, and they’re unstable, and they're moving, and constantly in motion, and that to put some sort of fixed structural constraint on all of this, is in fact, a wrong thing to do. So, what Giovanni then kind of says is ‘we've got to look at shifting hegemonies, so that who's the hegemonic power?’. He didn't deny at the time that the United States could make the claim to be fairly hegemonic but is it so hegemonic anymore? Let me tell you something that I read the other day which actually quite shocked me. I knew in 2008 when Lehman Brothers went belly up that the United States was not prepared – again my source is the Financial Times, great newspaper the only one worth reading in my view. I understood from that, that United States was extremely reluctant to let AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac go bankrupt, because to do so would have destroyed all of the Chinese investment. The Chinese would have been furious to put it mildly, and this would be an authentic disaster for the United States at the time. It's now become apparent from all of the leaks we now get from everywhere, that actually Russia proposed to China that they did a fast sale on all of their assets, in all of those institutions, and crash the whole global financial system, and that would have happened, there's no question about it. China and Russia owned 50% of the capital in those institutions, 50%. If you add Japan, you’re up to 60 or 70%. But Russia was actively negotiating with China. The Chinese refused. Now this is a moment when you’re kind of saying, ‘what does the concept of imperialism help you deal with that?’ It doesn't but hegemonic games, yeah that's what it's about. Whose hegemony? What is world money right now? This is a big question. Yeah, the Dollar still seems to be it, but you know all these other kinds of things like market baskets of currencies and all the rest of it. And the global indebtedness question is getting kind of curious. I mean the IMF the other day did a total thing on total global debt and it turns out the total global debt is 225% of global GDP. Now most people if you had said that 40 years ago people would say holy shit, this is the end of the world, but the IMF pointed it out and everybody says, ‘oh well I guess it's 225% of GDP’. But you know that was the kind of thing, if a nation had done that, you know 20 years ago, the IMF would have gone in and done a structural adjustment programme on them immediately and said you can't do this. So, I didn't think with situations of this kind that again talking about these kinds of things, which are very important, and what’s happening, and whose borrowing from whom, and whose carrying the debt, and where are the bondholders, and what are they doing. 7

Well yeah, those kinds of questions seem to me to be crucial to look at, and to follow up, in some detail, and I don't find the concept of imperialism which historically was useful, particularly useful in that situation. And actually in the 1970s I started to work with other concepts. Marx never as far as I know never ever used the concept of imperialism, he did certainly talk about colonialism, but imperialism was essentially Lenin’s big contribution to the argument, but Marx did have some very interesting things to say about space relations and redistributions that could occur. One of the interesting things Marx says about redistribution is that the equalisation of the rate of profit redistributes value from labour intensive sectors to capital intensive sectors, so there’s a transfer of value that goes on through the equalisation of the rate of profit. Now at a certain point Marx also recognises that this would be true for relations between nations. That a nation with a very labour intensive configuration would in fact supplement or subsidise a nation with very capital intensive configurations. Marx’s rule in the in the third volume of capital is that, he calls it a system of ‘capitalist communism’, which is, ‘from each capitalist according to the labour they employ, to each capital according to the capital they advance’, and I think that also applies nationally. So, Marx actually looks at that in a couple of places, in Theories of Surplus Value, and says yeah, these redistributions are occurring. But then he says something very interesting, he says, ‘but don't kid yourself, that this is a nation-to-nation thing, this is the capitalist class which gets it all’. So, the redistribution goes to the capitalist class, not to the people. So, when Trump goes after the Transpacific agreement, you kind of say, actually, it's correct that that agreement does not actually necessarily help the working class in this country, but it certainly helps capitalists. The argument about NAFTA is the same. It was no accident when NAFTA was signed, there were no representatives of labour in the room. Because all the benefits of NAFTA are going to go to the capitalist class. The working class is going to be hollowed out, and we see what some of the consequences of that have been. So, there are these kinds of transfers taking place, and here there's a very interesting configuration emerging all around the world, which is that for instance, in Germany the headquarters of a company can be in Munich, but the production takes place in Poland. Here the company can be located in Atlanta or Dallas, the production takes place in Mexico, in Monterrey. Actually of course you now got the technology where you can actually control the production line from Dallas into Monterey, and you can do it from Munich. Now these are transformations, technological transformations, the kinds of things that Marx talked about in 1847, and said, ‘these things make a real big difference’ and so you can't use the old categories in these kinds of situations. So, to me again these are the sorts of situations and actually a lot of the organisation of capitalism now is cross-border. So that NAFTA is a very good example of that, and actually then you kind of start to say, what is going on with the formation of, say something like the European Union? Who benefited from the European Union? Well clearly Germany did, you say, but no, the German working class didn't necessarily, at all, German corporations did. So, this is the point, there is a class way in which these things get worked out. I’m very concerned that we look very closely at that at the dynamics of this and what is happening with it. To me, I just don't find the category of imperialism that compelling. Now that my sound odd to you because I wrote a book in 2003 called The New Imperialism but 8

the point about that was that at that time the Neocons were actually saying ‘we need to be imperialist’. In fact, there was an ideological kind of attempt by the Neocons to advertise imperialism as the proper role for the United States. I mean it took the disaster of what happened in Iraq and so on to say well maybe back off that. But at that time, this was their language about what the imperialism was about. And in exactly the same way, when Giovanni [Arrighi] wrote his book on the Geometry of Imperialism, it was not in favour of imperialism, it was saying this is not the way you should look at it. So, the New Imperialism was an attempt to sort of say well that ideology of imperialism has become very powerful and potent in the United States right now but we need to do something else. One final point. Actually, I think there are all sorts of things going on in different parts of the world just going back to the tropical landmass, for example, I think it's no accident that about 80% of the Special Economic Zones that are producing goods, are in the tropics. So, the topics is a labour reserve, and this gets back to some of the things that Nancy is talking about, that actually the costs of social reproduction, all the rest of it, are lower there, and can be repressed there. The value of labour power is lower there, and so we get these kinds of relations being set up between productive activity in various parts of the world, much of which has been going to those parts of the world. So, to me is the tropics, if it's a reserve of anything, is that it’s a reserve of labour, and is being used as a reserve of labour in this kind of way. So, I just make a plea for much more sophisticated kind of understanding of how spatiality works, how countries which have a surplus of capital export it, and when they export it, what kind of things they do. And you can actually track each country. Japan started to have surpluses of capital in the 1960s, starts to export capital around the world, bought the Rockefeller centre, and did all kinds of other daft things, lost an amount of money in doing it. South Korea, end of the 1970s, suddenly the world floods with South Korean capital. Taiwan 1982 almost starts to [export capital]. I looked at a map the other day of Chinese foreign investment in 2002, the world is almost empty with a few dots here and there. You look at the world now of Chinese foreign investment, it’s big blobs everywhere. There's a huge pouring out of capital investment. Is China an imperialist power? No, it's simply engaging in what I call a spatial fix to its over-accumulation problem. It’s got surplus capacity in steel. So, what does it do? It says it's going to have a One Belt One Road, it’s going to put the steel into building the new networks of rail right across Europe, from China to Istanbul and way into Europe. It’s building all the railroads in East Africa. It’s doing major projects in Latin America, because it's got surpluses of money, and it's got surpluses of steel. So, what does it do? It lends the surpluses of money to Ecuador, so that Ecuador can buy the steel to build the hydroelectric plant. This is what it does. These are the practises that are there, which are old practices, and they still exist, but we have to think find a different language to talk about them, or if we talk about imperialism, just recognise it as sort of a metaphor rather than anything very real.

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1:25:36 Prabhat Patnaik: That’s a very rich set of comments, I don't think I'd be able to really respond to them adequately, at all, let alone in in 5 minutes or so. I think some of the issues which were raised by Duncan were very important. In particular I found very interesting what he said about the role of globalisation in terms of it destroying the capacity of class struggle. And I think that's very important because in India for instance which I'm very familiar, a number of mechanisms have come together, one is privatisation of the public sector. Trade unions are always far more powerful in the public sector than in the private sector. In fact, in the United States as you know 33% of the public sector workers which includes education are unionised while in the private sector it’s just 8%. The same is true in India and elsewhere. One of the reasons why France still has a very strong trade union movement is because it still has a strong public sector. So, you know, the privatisation of the public sector. Enormous increases in the reserve army of labour, which I'll come to in a moment, because of which there’s casualization, all of which has really destroyed the capacity of unions. The last real militant trade union action we had in India was in 1974, there was a railway strike, after that, there has been nothing comparable, [maybe] one or two day strikes... So yes, I think very important changes are taking place, some of these changes are related to what I’ll be coming to. No I’ll come to Nancy’s point in a moment, but you know, I really don't understand what David Harvey’s argument is, of course it is true that capitalism has been changing, of course it is true there are lots of things happening, of course it is true that you have the nature of hegemony changing, nobody is denying all that. But at the same time, I mean, it's also true that there’s diffusion of activities from the United States to China to India and so on, but at the same time what is also true is that there's a huge attack on the petty production peasant sector all over the world. Now I'll come to Sanjay’s point about whether it has led to absolute immiseration, but the fact is there is a huge agrarian crisis. Now why is it, that precisely in the period of globalisation when you have this diffusion of activities and so on, instead of this actually giving rise to some kind of capitalist development that absorbs the reserve army of labour, you actually have a huge agrarian crisis that is increasing the reserve army of labour? Now that in a sense is the kind of question, which I'm interested in and that's what the book is trying to raise, and to the extent there is this agrarian crisis, I think it also acts to, you know, lots of peasants have left their land they come to the towns in search of jobs, which are non-existent and this increase in the reserve army is one of the reasons why the capacity of unions for instance and so on, to be militant is something which is impaired greatly. I think Nancy’s distinction between exploitation and expropriation is extremely important. In fact, the whole point about imperialism is that it was associated traditionally with expropriation, that you know, quite apart from the exploitation, the extraction surplus value from production, you also had this expropriation from the petty production and other sectors, the outlying regions, outside of the capitalist sector. 10

Now that is precisely the phenomenon which I believe is going on today, which is why I think David's example about the shift of surplus value from you know less labour intensive to capital intensive. Or you know, whatever means of production intensive, or higher organic composition of capital activities, is something which takes place within the domain of exploitation, but in addition to that there is this whole business of expropriation. Marx talked about it in his writing on colonialism. He actually talked about the drain. He says what the British take away without any quid-pro-quo, so the point is that it is expropriation aspect that imperialism is concerned with. I don't disagree with David about the enormous numbers of changes and their importance of course in analysing capitalism, but I want to say that nonetheless this expropriation is important. Now Nancy's right that expropriation occurs not only vis-à-vis the peasants and petty produces, it also occurs also vis-à-vis the housewives and so on. Just two points I want to make. The first is that I think there is there's a dynamics whereby the expropriation tends to increase because of the increasing supply price, that is the argument I was trying to put forward. And the second point is that of course we find that because of this, I mean, when you have an increasing supply price, you can have an increase in the intensity of expropriation across the board, but certainly that may well be happening, but there is, visible evidence of an increase in expropriation, which is manifested in terms of an agrarian crisis all over the world. You know it's not just India and so on. The Chinese have become more conscious about it. In China as you know exactly the same thing was going on until they started you know, this ‘towards a socialist countryside’ and so there has been a shift in Chinese official policy towards agriculture, which may have brought about a bit of a change, we don't even know how much of a change, but even in China there was a decline in foodgrain consumption till about 2004, there has been some kind of increase after that. But this is a general phenomenon, and I think this is general phenomenon that actually stimulated us to examine and write this book, because this is the phenomenon which had characterised colonialism. That was also a period in which there was an acute agrarian crisis, prolonged worsening condition of the peasants, peasant production, output falling per head and so on. Now it is this, which I believe, is ignored in the official literature, at least in official economic literature. For instance, most of you are students of economics would have read about something called the agricultural revolution that preceded the industrial revolution and is supposed to have it were laid the ground for it. Do you know during the so-called agricultural revolution, per capita corn output in Britain actually fell? So, you have a real miasma of concepts which tend to hide the fact that really there was massive expropriation going on, which is why we actually wrote this. As far as this foodgrain business is concerned maybe we'll talk it out later.

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1:35:51 David Harvey: If you start to ask who's doing what where, for instance if you're interested in extractivism in Latin America, you'll pretty soon come up with the Canadians, and they’re right in the middle of it all. If you sort of say who's who are the main operators in the Zambian copperbelt, the two largest corporations, one is Indian and the other is Chinese, so are we talking about Indian imperialism, and Chinese imperialism, and Canadian imperialism and Luxembourg’s imperialism, and all rest of it? This is why the concept doesn’t make sense to me in that in that form. There are processes which are described in the analysis of the imperialisms of the 19th and 20th century which are alive and well and that therefore can be learned from an those processes, like for example, the way Britain lent money to Argentina to build the railroads that actually fostered the demand for British steel, and all of that. This is what the Chinese are doing with Ecuador. Ecuador ran out of money and borrowed money so Ecuador is building big hydroelectric plants and its Chinese steel, Chinese generators, and all the rest of it. So, you know that game has been going on for a very long time. You can say this is a practise which is very traditional but then that comes back to the issue of who has the surpluses that they don't know what to do with, and when did China get to a point where it largely absorbed surpluses? And by the way this is the other thing, when you talk about imperialism as between nation states, but there's a lot of internal geographical redistributions going on. In other words, I would also want to say I'm interested in uneven geographical development within the United States, for example. Or if you look at something like the Euro and the uneven geographical development of what's happening to Greece, versus Germany you've got some extractions of value going on there. Now are we going to say that's an imperialist configuration? No, it's a transfer of value and I think that value transfers geographical and all the rest of it have to be looked at in terms of their quantity and their scale. The thing about the Chinese, the sudden massive scale internally and externally I mean China has consumed half of the world’s cement, half of the world’s steel, more than half of the world's copper, nearly half of all of the world's mineral resources since 2008. I mean so you can't analyse much of what's going on in the world without looking at this huge demand. And I mentioned there the demand for soybeans coming out of China, and the revolution that's gone on in China. Just to give you a piece of data always blows my mind between 2011 and 2013 China, consumed 45% more cement than the United States consumed in 100 years. Ok so this is a sort of enormous kind of transformation that's going on and I don't think we can say, ‘let’s fit it into some box called imperialism’. This is a kind of radical transformation, urbanisation is going on at that huge rate, flows of investment between capital cities. Every city I go to, there's a huge investment going on in terms of property, but it's luxury condominiums and spectacular cars everywhere. Why globally are we building cities for people to invest in and not cities for people to live in? So in this city we have a crisis of affordable housing and huge amounts of construction 12

going on in terms of luxury condominiums and the rest of it. So, all those things are going on. Just one point you mentioned which I think is very important. It's clear that one of the themes which I think you do get at, but I think you get at in the wrong way, if you don't mind me saying so, is yes the destruction of the economic basis of agrarian life, but this is going on not only in India, it's going on in Brazil, it's going on throughout Africa, it's going on everywhere, it's connected to what Nancy was talking about, of land grabs, and all the rest of it, so that is indeed a huge process and if you just wrote about that I'd be I'll be fine, you know, I mean I no problem, it's just that somehow or rather, everything is then locked into this concept of imperialism that doesn’t for me, work.

1:57:43 David Harvey: I think the problems for me derive not from imperialism but from capitalism, so my foundational concept is capital. Capital is value in motion. Its motion is terribly important to understand. Its motion is a spiral. It's constantly expanding geographically and temporally, and, in the process, it absorbs many parts of the world into its net and does it differentially. When Marx is writing Capital, social relations were dominated and only a very small part of the world, it’s now global, so this is a different story we're in. The period of imperialism in the classic sense that Nancy says that I hold was that one which was in the middle of the 19th century. The neo colonial form of imperialism was being dominant was dominating in many ways after that although there were imperial structures, as you know, they went to war in the 1930s and this was regionalization of capital into distinctive struggles, elements of which you see in the current situation. There are regional hegemons around that are essentially exercising dominant power than their region. And there’s geopolitical conflicts emerging, these are the kinds of things we need to track. My objection, it's kind of interesting, Prabhat agreed with everything I said, but he didn't mention it in his book about Imperialism. It was ignored. So that's my problem that it puts something, so I would want to talk about the dynamics of capital, and what the dynamics of capital is about, how necessary uneven geographical development is to that dynamic, and how there is not only accumulation by expanded reproduction but there's what I call accumulation by dispossession, but there's also appropriation through realisation and distribution, that is appropriation in the market, and that is a terribly important category that Marx didn't really get to. We've got to change a lot of our categories to deal with this situation even as we base what we're doing very much in Marxist theory of capital that's the way I tend to look at it.

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2:00:17 Prabhat Patnaik: I'll be very brief I am not talking about Indian, Chinese, Canadian imperialism. I am actually talking about the situation where the main driving force today is globalised finance capital, and the effect of globalised finance capital particularly on the petty production sector, is what I am talking about, and that to my mind is a continuation of the colonial relationship. You agreed with me about agrarian life getting destroyed, agrarian life was getting destroyed in the colonial period, agrarian life is getting destroyed today. What is common between then and now? That's basically what we're trying to ask in this book and what is common is of course this whole question of the attack on petty production as essential for value of money and so on. The domestic bourgeoisie, in most of these countries, is in fact complicit, is integrated to this globalised finance capital and that's a big change compared to the colonial period when the bourgeoisie in many of these countries led the anticolonial struggle, today it’s on the other side. There was a very important question raised about programme. Quite frankly one does not talk about imperialism just for scholastic reasons, I think it's very important in order to derive a programme from it and the programme I would derive is that because of this attack on petty production, it’s very important in these countries, certainly in big country like India and China and so on, that there be a worker-peasant alliance which is willing to delink from globalisation, in order to put an alternative agenda in place, as long as you are integrated with globalisation no alternative agenda and that I believe is a problem with the European Left. Finally, I agree with Akeel [Bilgrami] that you know there are many bad things are going on, but one particular bad thing is what we're talking about, namely, the attack on petty production, the attack on agrarian life, which had been going on earlier and is going on now. Finally, the value of money you know I wrote two books before this, one was called Accumulation & Stability Under Capitalism, the other was called Value of Money. Both those books are basically based on assumptions of constant returns, while this theory of imperialism introduces increasing supply prices additional theoretical element. Thank you.

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