james m blaut wrote:
> Louis P:
>
> Read on. Give us a new post on each chapter of David Harvey's book as you
> finish reading it. Let's see if your ideas change as you proceed.
>
> En lucha
>
> Jim B
>
> P.S. Tail the workers. Down with theory.
This is silly. It was precisely the workers who asked for help from the
theoreticians. Lots of people helped; Teresa Hayter btw also wrote a very good
book called 'Aid and Imperialism'. Mike Cooley and people from the Lucas
Aerospace shop stewards worked with the Rover stewards to develop alternative
plans for socially-useful production. They talked about fuel cell technology;
naturally no-one was interested. These weren't just a bunch of labour
union dinosaurs; I went to some of their meetings myself, with people from
the Conference of Socialist Economists. David Harvey drifted like an
angst-ridden wraith thru all this. Meanwhile the Thatcher govt destroyed the
unions and demonised its leaders in pretty much the terms Harvey himself
used: they hated the British 'rustbelt'. Harvey also hated the Oxford Rover
works
because he happened to be professor of geography in the nearby dreaming
spires. Factories are noisy, smelly places, aren't they? So much for the
geography of social justice. Harvey the professional revolutionary went on to
win a gold medal from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography, and
the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society (Patron: Prince Charles,
if I remember rightly), amongst many other awards and decorations for
services rendered. Not to the workers of Rover, though.
As for his book, the scale of his 'revolutionary' vision is expressed in one
of Harvey's concluding remarks: 'we owe it to subsequent generations to invest
now in a collective and very public search for some way to understand the
possibilities of achieving a just and ecologically sensitive urbanisation
process...'
Yeah, right on. Just the kind of fire-breathing stuff Prince Charles loves
.....
Mark Jones
