Posts Tagged ‘Donald Trump’

David Harvey: “There are very good reasons right now to be anti-capitalist”

December 15th, 2016 No Comments

British geographer and social theorist David Harvey, a special guest at the opening of L’Alternativa independent film festival, visited the CCCB to explain the relationship between modern capitalism and the political impact of Donald Trump’s election win

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After over forty years spent teaching Marx’s Capital – now also from his YouTube  channel – Harvey’s view on the free market system reveals itself as clear, organised and categorical. We interviewed him to find out more about what his assessment is of the latest political changes.

Why Donald Trump?

For David Harvey, the question should be turned around: Why didn’t Hillary Clinton win? The fact that anyone can read in the media that “Clinton went to talk for Goldman Sachs and received 270,000 dollars for one speech” gave a lot of fuel to Trump’s arguments. On the basis that voters in the big cities – such as New York – are more inclined to vote Democrat, it was in rural areas and among the most vulnerable social classes where the American magnate’s discourse made the deepest impression.

According to Harvey, on a popular level, typical people talking in bars, it was felt that Hillary Clinton was not the kind of person who was going to work for them. The determining idea that led to Trump’s electoral victory was that “he made his own money”, which furthermore embodies the old ideal of the American dream. Meanwhile, Clinton was viewed as a person who, favoured by her position of power, was in politics purely to make a lot of money.

The economic boom

Capitalism has always been about growth. According to this British professor, the growth rate of societies with a free market economic system, since it always follows an exponential curve, can reach an inflection point. A point where the curve can no longer hold out. Harvey uses China as an example of the country that has grown most significantly and that has also kept global capitalism stable since 2008, thanks to a massive urbanisation programme

In fact, between the years 2011 and 2013, China consumed 45% more cement than the United States consumed in the whole of the 20th century. So, what will Trump do? “Nobody knows exactly what he’s going to do, but what I can guarantee is that he’ll try to create a boom in the US economy through urbanisation programmes, just like China did. He has to provide answers to all the people on low wages who voted for him”, comments Harvey.

 Transition to a zero growth economy

The consequences of this urbanisation process, if it really does happen, may be very different. But the key, according to this geographer, is that we are going to move towards a new inflection point in the economy. “The growth will have to stop, inevitably. And copying the Chinese model, apart from the consequences it may have for the environment and socio-political contexts, creates political fighting and all the social tensions that we are seeing today”.

“There are very good reasons to be anti-capitalist right now”, Harvey affirms. The situation that a new mass urbanisation process could lead us to should make us think about what we will do when that inflection point arrives. “We have to say to people explicitly that we need to manage this transition to a zero growth economy and it must be done in a way that is socially equitable”.

So now what?

Leaving aside the racist solutions offered by the Trump side, we still find other alternatives. Harvey points out that in the United States what might happen, for example, is that the political faction led by Bernie Sanders, who lost to Hillary Clinton in the primaries, may become dominant inside the Democratic Party. “This may lead to solutions in terms of building something that truly responds to the problems of growth”.

In the United Kingdom, something similar is happening with Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Here is the case of a politician with little support among Labour MPs, but tremendous support from the mass party. This antagonism within the party itself has grown very quickly, along with new memberships to enable people to vote for him in internal processes.

Meanwhile, in relation to Barcelona and similar cities, Harvey observes certain movements with a popular base that, on a municipal level, are making the effort to change the nature of the urbanisation process and the effects of mass tourism. In this sense, these movements are becoming a response to one of the great challenges of the current time: “building cities to live in, as opposed to cities to invest in”.

The lecture by David Harvey at CCCB is available here.

Who Votes for Donald Trump?

October 28th, 2016 No Comments

New Yorker journalist William Finnegan offered some keys for understanding the Republican candidate’s success.

How can it be that one of the least prepared, most sexist, racist and xenophobic men on the planet is candidate to occupy the post with most responsibility and power in global politics? That’s the question many of us are asking ourselves after seeing or reading the umpteenth news report on the latest gaffes of Republican politician Donald Trump. It’s also the question that New Yorker journalist William Finnegan attempted to answer at the lecture he gave at the CCCB “Journalism and the Future of Democracy”.

Donald Trump is viewed by many analysts as a freak; a strange phenomenon in the politics of the United States. Instead of placing the focus on his grotesque and rude character, William Finnegan talked about the media and the political context that has helped Trump reach the gates of the White House. Whether he wins the elections or loses, this journalist considers that there are two main phenomena that have turned American politics upside down and that are keys to understanding Trump’s electoral rise:

- The power exercised by the entire network of right-wing media (radio, TV, websites) from the orbit of the Fox television network. Media that have broken away from the model where news must be based on facts and truths, substituting these with opinion and entertainment. At the heart of this tangled web is Donald Trump, television reality king and expert. Finnegan explained how many Americans are living in a news bubble and only listen, read, or see on their Facebook walls “news” items that coincide with their way of seeing and understanding the world.

- The loss of support and electoral bases that has been suffered by the Democratic Party both in the south and the north of the country. De-industrialisation has left many white American low and middle class workers unemployed, and the discourse of fear and anger against immigrants promoted by Trump fits in well with their mood. “They are looking for someone who will speak for them, a saviour,” says Finnegan. And Donald Trump is their man.

Summary

In this video (9 minutes) we have summarised the main interventions by William Finnegan from the lecture that he offered at the CCCB.

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The video of the entire lecture (1 h 30 min) is also available in the original version (English) or with simultaneous translation into Catalan. In this video, as well as the complete intervention by the American author, you can also hear the questions from the audience plus writer Albert Forns’ introduction of William Finnegan. In addition to being a journalist and a writer, Finnegan is a surfer, and he won the Pulitzer 2016 Prize for Best Biography or Autobiography for a book about surfing.

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