At 05:39 PM 4/29/98 -0700, you wrote:
>Louis, I for one find personal criticisms of David Harvey to be useless.
>I'll bet he has character flaws, since everyone else does (including that
>old hairy German guy who wrote so much). The question is: what are the
>theoretical and/or empirical holes in his perspective? I know you've talked
>about that before, but that's what I think most of pen-l finds to be useful.
>
>Anyway, I finally got my Monthly Review issue with the Harvey/Foster
>debate. So a week after the rest of you folks, I can catch up.
>
>in pen-l solidarity,
>
>Jim Devine
These are not "personal" criticisms. A personal criticism would be that he
was abusive to his wife, as Karl Marx was, and would be of as much interest
to this forum. I will repost a reply I made over on M-I to Jim Blaut that
is really at the political heart of the matter:
--------------
Jim Blaut:
>Re my postscript, quote: "Tail the workers. down with theory." This was an
>ironic comment on Lou's total misreading and misunderstanding of a bit of
>Dave Harvey's book. Lou flat out attacks David for worrying about the issue
>of the strike and about his ability or inability, as a writer of theory, to
>assist the workers. Lou is bellowing: tail the workers, down with theory,
>down with the bourgeois Oxford professor, etc.
Louis P:
This is an evasion of the real issue. Harvey was like Hamlet on the
question of keeping the Rover plant open. "To keep open, or not to keep
open--that is the question" was heard from his lips as paced the quad at
Oxford in the lonely hours of the night. And what was the big factor that
made him lean in the direction of not keeping it open? THAT THERE WERE TOO
MANY CARS ALREADY BEING PRODUCED IN CAPITALIST EUROPE!!!! As if this is a
problem for revolutionary socialists. When we have a dictatorship of the
proletariat, we will make those kinds of decisions as the Cubans did in the
1960s when they decided to make car imports a low priority. Or when the
Soviet bloc invested in trolley-cars rather than autos. BUT TO WORRY THAT
THERE ARE ALREADY TOO MANY SAABS, BMW'S, AND FIATS?! What kind of question
is that for a "Marxist" to worry about. To keep the Rover plant open was a
class struggle issue, not an economic planning issue. Hayter understood
that and Harvey didn't. He apparently still doesn't, based on his account
of the incident.
----------------
As far as my character study of Harvey is concerned, I have sort of run out
of material for the time being. In my continued reading of the text last
night, Harvey the angst-ridden professor recedes into the background. If I
come up with anything new and interesting in the course of the book, I do
plan to share it with people, however. Jim will just have to live with it.
If you want to get a sense of the sort of approach I am taking to Harvey, I
will give you a flavor for what Lingua Franca did with Mike Davis, another
superstar Marxist academic. I happen to enjoy iconoclastic treatments like
this, and of course when I serve them up, they are free. What more can you
ask for:
Lingua Franca:
Davis, who never completed his Ph.D. in history at UCLA, has his own
misgivings about the academy. As the father of two school-age children, he
needs the security of a steady income, but he has not made it easy for
departments to bring him on board. This spring the University of Southern
California nearly offered him an endowed chair in American history. Davis,
who had spray painted the university's walls with anti-Vietnam graffiti in
1965, was thrilled but warned administrators, "You'll have intractable
problems if you hire me." When friends in the food-service workers' union
informed him that the university was contracting out the jobs of its
cafeteria workers, Davis assailed the school in the L.A. Weekly as "the
most reactionary institution in L.A." A top administrator accused him of
slander, and the job was given to someone else.
Even when his extracurricular politics are not the issue, Davis's
pedagogical practices might well cause a university to think twice about
tenuring him. Once, while teaching at the Southern California Institute of
Architecture, he devised an experiment to prove that one could feel
reasonably safe in any neighborhood in L.A. in the middle of the night. One
of his students, a crown prince of Fiji, decided to test this idea in
Hollywood. There he met a handful of drug dealers, and they ended up having
a marvelous time--until they were jumped by another group of dealers, who
stabbed and nearly killed the prince. Davis recalls: "When I visited him in
the hospital, I told him how sorry I was, but he said, 'No, Mike, I'll
never be able to thank you for this. I would never have experienced
anything like it in Fiji.'" Even so, Davis was almost fired over the
incident. "I had to lie low for a while after that," he says with a smile.
