Dissolving Empire: David Harvey, John Smith, and the Migrant

This was not Harvey’s first grand debate on the subject of imperialism. Recently, the Patnaiks included Harvey’s response to their own work on imperialism  in their very own volume: a fruitful and polite exchange that revolves around the question whether commodities that come mainly from tropical countries, are producible only at an increasing supply price, threatening the value of money, and causing income deflation in the global South. The geographical and climatic core of capitalism is a given for the Patnaiks and Harvey challenges their idea with restrained delight.

Unfortunately, it is hard to describe the subject of my blogpost, the debate between Harvey and Smith, as restrained, polite delight. Harvey talks of Smith’s ‘rank idealism,’ his ‘crude and rigid theory of imperialism,’ and a ‘polemic instead of a reasoned critique.’ Smith had irked Harvey by shedding light on one of the least defensible aspects of Harvey’s concept of ‘deterritorialised, deracinated, depersonalized global capital,’ commanding a world where the imperialist super-exploitation of the East and of the South had already ceased and where the role of the imperialist super-exploiter had been reassigned to China’s and other East Asian countries’ bourgeoisies. Where ‘roles have already been reversed’ between East and West, as Harvey put it.

“Where are the millions of foreign students that pay the equivalent of hundreds of years of local wages, for a semester at a university in the People’s Republic of China”

John Smith battles Harvey’s problematic assertions with a political economy toolkit from his magnificent volume, and then again in his roape.net entry, and I shall not repeat here his arguments on outsourcing, global labour arbitrage, or how the last global financial crisis appeared. Instead, I shall concentrate on what I understand to be Harvey’s fundamental flow of method in their debate: the disappearance of time, and thus, historicity, from Harvey’s thought. This is no small matter when we consider that Lenin considered imperialism a stage of capitalism. 

This hiatus did not appear just with Harvey’s take on Smith’s theory of imperialism. He recently critiqued the Patnaiks by saying that their ‘concepts of space, place, geography, environment are all wrong.’ To Smith in a similar vein: ‘there I found the traditional conception of imperialism derived from Lenin (and subsequently set in stone by the likes of John Smith) inadequate to describe the complex spatial interterritorial and space-specific forms of production, realization and distribution,’ in both cases entirely omitting the factor of time, history, and historical materialism from his summary.

This is not by chance. Harvey’s omission is structural, conscious, and dangerous. In his early career and again in the case of his tome on the Paris Commune, employed a historical method, and the problem is not his lack of mastery of the subject, of which he is a global expert. Smith also notices how for Harvey, ‘developing countries are now draining wealth from the imperialist centres. This assertion (is) made without any supporting evidence or estimate of magnitude’ (emphasis by Adam Mayer). In other words, even if China super-exploits workers domestically and to some extent internationally (in exceptional cases), does this mean that China in economic, cultural, social, or military terms has reached the status of an imperialist power, and that ‘relations are now reversed’ between East and West, as Harvey claims?

“When the wretched of the earth die to reach the shores of the People’s Republic of China at sea, and not the shores of Australia as they currently do, that is precisely when I will be ready to follow Harvey’s take on imperialism”

When Harvey analyses the changing landscapes of global capital, he concentrates on production, finance, town planning, wages and interest rates but ignores in its entirety the role of cultural capital and a host of other forms of capital, such as social capital, and something else that materializes when they are absent: desire. Social capital is of course very often associated with amelioration of working people’s living conditions, and is usually used in a reformist context. The concept of cultural capital, due to its provenance in Bourdieu, is usually seen as less applicable to non-European economies (as Bourdieu includes patterns of speech and habits such as enjoying opera performances, as part of the bourgeoisie’s and its individual members’ cultural capital). I propose here to focus rather on the flipside of social and cultural capital: the very monetary convertibility of social and cultural capital, the fate of the subaltern and the excluded, the figure of the migrant who desires legal, social and cultural capital, in order to demonstrate how absurd Harvey’s notion of the changing cores of global imperialism really is. The figure of the African migrant (from the refugee who loses his life on a boat on the way to Italy, to the absentee bourgeois who purchased his first world citizenship after bleeding his tropical home of resources in order to be able to do so), is central to our investigation of where imperialism resides, and where empires are really located.

If we think even for a moment about where research, patents, fashions, new ideas and ideologies are born and nurtured, we see immediately how offensively improbable Harvey’s argument is. Where are the millions of foreign students that pay the equivalent of hundreds of years of local wages, for a semester at a university in the People’s Republic of China, or even in Japan? Even Japan and South Korea woo talented students with scholarships from less fortunate countries, not to mention China or the others (China just started employing foreign professors and is in a frenzy to get foreign students by offering scholarships). Are Chinese degrees capital investments in ways that US, or even New Zealand degrees are? The PRC is an absolute newcomer to the game of how cultural capital works in the modern world – on work innovation, R&D, global fashion function and how to create desire on a global scale.

Harvey claims that due partly to super-exploitation originating in the East, the Western worker’s plight is now on a convergence course with the Eastern and Southern worker. The Western worker or unemployed person does not live on the lap of luxury as Harvey reminds us in his rebuttal of Smith’s work. However, many Western unemployed workers have access to food (in the form of food stamps or unemployment benefits), and many have health coverage. Compare this with Hungary (a semi-peripheral economy) where there is no unemployment benefit, and the peripheral economies of Asia and Africa, where the poor live in constant fear of hunger. When it comes to Harvey’s ‘new imperialists’: Singapore for one has no unemployment benefits at all (and treats this problem as part and parcel of its promotion of family values and ‘responsibility’). I am discussing an individual’s very food security here: people are fed even in exploitative and privately owned US prisons, while they are not fed even in state prisons in many countries of the South and East where relatives are expected to bring in food for inmates or else the convict dies of hunger. (US prison populations, and especially Black prison inmates, are obviously, a super-exploited group in US capitalism and this is not to deny their super-exploitation but to illustrate how in the West, relative deprivation means different things from what it means outside the West).

“By 2018, significant segments of both the comprador bourgeoisie and of the professional class have emigrated from countries such as Nigeria, effectively constituting a new, emergent global class of Southern absentee bourgeoisie in the North”

It is beyond absurd to compare the status of the Western proletariat (and precariat, and lumpenproletariat, and peasantry, and single working mothers, and the elderly) in core Western countries and those outside those countries. Even if a Western unemployed person is materially poorer than a Southern or Eastern unemployed person, the former owns (in a very immediate sense) a passport that is worth literally dying for (as African migrants, and Asian migrants, demonstrate day to day, tragically). Thus, it is not Smith but David Harvey, who is thinking in an idealist way, when mistaking money flows and production flows for imperial standing. It is true that the crumbs that fall to the subaltern classes within Western economies are made possible by imperial super-exploitation in late capitalism: to deny this is to deny the obvious. When the wretched of the Earth die to reach the shores of the People’s Republic of China at sea, and not the shores of Australia as they currently do, that is precisely when I will be ready to follow Harvey’s take on imperialism to the extent that ‘reversing the roles has perhaps just advanced beyond its very inception.’ But when legal protections, simple food security, as well as access to knowledge and innovation are as unequally distributed as they are today – and the inequality is growing –  it may well take decades or a century to talk of roles ‘already reversed’ (and what if China chooses to coexist in a secondary role to the corporate West as Japan does?). This is what I mean when I say that Harvey ignores the factor of time and that his focus on space is rigid. Importantly, at the point, when ‘roles have reversed,’ this very debate would take place in Mandarin, and not English (the author of this blogpost is Hungarian).

I would go further. Beyond cultural, social and legal capital, there is the lack of access, the lack of rights, the lack of opportunities, the lack of dreams. From Africa, since structural adjustment programmes and the even more hypocritically named poverty reduction programmes have disenfranchised the post-colonial state and deindustrialized the continent, the African proletariat and the unemployed started to seek Western passports just to ensure survival. As a parallel development, the bourgeoisie has become similarly mobile, just to secure their possessions and their families’ survival amidst a rapidly deteriorating security situation in their home countries. By 2018, significant segments of both the comprador bourgeoisie and of the professional class have emigrated from countries such as Nigeria, effectively constituting a new, emergent global class of Southern absentee bourgeoisie in the North. This very class, one leg in the old country, and another in the US or the UK, is represented by the émigré writers who represent global peaks in high literature, such as Chimamanda Adichie and others.

The poor however, cross the Mediterranean risking their lives just to reach the refugee camps of Italy (a journey that although it usually costs several thousand dollars, is also extremely risky). The better off try to arrange faux marriages with European partners. The really rich may of course, purchase citizenships in the imperialist nations, such as Spain, for around €500,000 per family (entirely risk free, realized in real estate investment). Such is the meaning of – the lack of – social and legal capital: in order to link yourself to a functional society and its benefits (to imperialism, if you will), you may invest as much as your life, your emotional wellbeing, or a very serious amount of money, just to ensure your access to the ameliorative effects and affects, of living in a core imperialist country.

Now to the flipside of the concept of cultural capital. For elite ranks of the global bourgeoisie, the education component of their cultural capital is almost entirely covered by money: they can pay their way through the best schools in the best countries. The global middle class may need scholarships, tricks such as eyeing spousal employment patterns in say, Cambridge. The poor are shut out from most of knowledge production and even access in most countries.

“David Harvey’s ahistorical studies of unstable flows and dissolving empire and centre-less capitalism lull us into feeling better about ourselves and our role in the machine (wherever we are), and thus they help kill our revolutionary instincts”