I'm glad Louis P. intends to look at David Harvey's new book more
carefully, because I think Harvey has been somewhat misrepresented (there
are clearly also real political differences).
Harvey is no point-of-production-only 'Marxist'. Quite the contrary. I
don't know what he said on this at the forum Louis referred to; given how
he has been hammered for 'totalizing metanarative' etc. in his 1989 book on
postmodernism, perhaps he occasionally has to restate the facts of life
about class society. (My own take on his 1989 book is that while correctly
trying to relate the emergence of pomo to the changing nature of
capitalism, he fails to really incorporate the crucial intermediary in his
explanation, namely class.) Harvey has been trying to bring space and place
into Marxism for decades.
The point Harvey makes over and over in his 1996 book _Justice, Nature and
the Geography of Difference_ is the impossibility of referring to nature,
the environment, etc. as separate or external to human society. I would
have thought Louis would appreciate his provocation that "...in a
fundamental sense there is nothing unnatural about New York city..."(p. 186).
It is not sectarian in the least to identify the class content in different
environmentalist positions, or to note the reactionary edges (he reminds us
the Nazis were the first radical ecologists to hold state power). Harvey's
political complaint is that middle class environmentalism fixates on
non-urban 'pristine nature', while cities choke from pollution and the best
way to locate toxic waste sites is to visit lower-income minority
communities. I don't think Lenin's "tribune of the people" set aside
his/own own class politics, in fact they are what makes it possible to take
up broader concerns.
It is also unfair to suggest Harvey closes his eyes to ecological
constraints to (current) society. He repeats the elementary materialist
fact that planet earth can be altered but not destroyed. As I recall it,
his criticism of apocaliptic accounts is more for their de-politicising and
demoralizing effects (this is never a socialist stance) as it is any
particular evaluation of the scientific evidence on this point.
Harvey does take a crack at Michael Perelman, along with Ted Benton and
James O'Conner, for the way they take up the issue of natural limits
("capitulation to capitalist arguments" - p.146). However, he also notes
the obverse error has been all too common among Marxists, and goes on to
think about what a more adequately dialectical formulation of the problem
might be. I didn't find any breakthrough, but the effort deserves more
respect than Louis' comments suggest.
Bill Burgess
