“Indebted Students Don’t Protest”

As the only Swedish paper, Lundagård has met renowned geographer David Harvey, who’s disappointed in the lack of a radical student movement. “I think students have to self organize”.

David Harvey describes volume two of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital as “the most boring book ever written.” In his work of writing a somewhat more interesting introduction he began to reflect on the contradictory aspects of capitalism. The result was the book Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism.

After a day of presenting his book in a crammed auditorium and forming part of the thesis committee in a dissertation defence, Lundagård meets a slightly weary David Harvey at the Grand Hotel in Lund.

You said in your speech today that ”indebted students don’t protest”. Why do you think that is and who do you think are the people benefiting from that?

– “Well, it’s a very general assertion. I don’t have any empirical proof. But it is the case that indebted homeowners are politically active in rather reactionary directions.  I think it’s rather remarkable that some of the tuition increase that initially provoked student outrage and student reaction did not end up producing a long time student movement. My conclusion, which is as much guesswork as it is well informed, is that the indebtedness which is dominating the student body has first of been accepted, and at the same time is something which is going to keep people in a condition of debt peonage for a considerable part of their life.”

So do you think that this indebtedness has created or will create a more reactionary student body?

– “I don’t know weather it will create a more reactionary student body. It certainly has not sparked the level of activism I thought would had been there. The same way that in Britain the imposition of tuition fees has not generated a long term campaign of extensive agitation for the abolition of those fees. I think that, in that instance, had there been mass agitation it would have been very difficult for the Labour party not to have backed the abolition of fees. I think this again is part of a quiescence of acceptance of the commodification of higher education, which I think should had been resisted more emphatically.”

You mentioned the importance of reaching out with information and that we “might very well have a movement on our hands” if this information is spread widely. What do you think should be the method for that and to whom should this be addressed?

– “I think that students themselves have to self organize. And there are signs of this. Small groups of students who are emphatically seeking to generate a movement. But my impression is that they are faced with a lot of indifference on part of the mass of the student body.”

But will information be enough or is there a “need”, if that is the right word, for the population to be pushed further before a movement is formed?

– “There are certain necessary conditions for a movement to emerge. One necessary condition, which I think is not being met by the leadership on the left, is some vision of the alternative. A lot of people will say “where’s the alternative?” and “what kind of vision do you have?”. And it’s not there. Now, providing an vision of some kind is an important prerequisite for any movement, but that doesn’t guarantee a movement.”

– “My view of the processes of social change is that you need simultaneous changes in many dimensions, including in our mental conceptions of the world. And our mental conceptions of the world have been corralled by the way in which oppositional activity has been structured. If you want to claim discrimination you have to show individual harm and individual intent. Victimization politics is not good solidarity politics. Victims come forward and maybe some of them can tell a sufficient hard luck story to earn compensation or some remedee. But there’s nothing done about the mass population. So the hard luck story becomes the main form of politics or the remedee of some ill.”

– “What the left, I think, doesn’t understand is that it’s being corralled into this kind of opposition. Which in fact renders it rather powerless when it comes to solidarious mass movements. So there’s a struggle to find ways to express mass opposition to a system which has constructed a possibility of politics which only lies in this victimhood kind of politics, which is not going to lead to any radical change. Once we understand the sophistication of neoliberal corralling of politics in this way we have got to learn ways to transcend it, but I don’t think we have learned that at this moment.”

The most common counter argument from the left to the sort of politics you’re promoting is that this humanitarian solidarity is usually for white men.

– “I think that there is strong reason to be anti racist and take gender politics very seriously. The difficulty is that if you do not pay attention to how the “economic engine” of capitalism is fucking people over, you’re missing a big chunk of the point. For example, maybe four or six million people in the United States lost their homes and a disproportionate amount of those were immigrant or African American communities and women. But the actual drive to push the crash can not be explained by looking at race and gender. Its impact was filtered through race and gender, but its origins were not.”

What possibilities do the universities have as places of struggle?

– “There are people who sometimes say to me that “you’re just sitting there in academia” and “you should go to the steelwork” or something like that. Well, in the same way that the steelwork needs steelworkers who can agitate you need people to keep spaces open inside of the university for the kind of knowledge production which is counter hegemonic. That takes a lot of effort, a lot of work and a lot of commitment.”