I've been reading all this with interest. As a doctoral student of
David's in the mid-late 1980s, I'll attest to his staple gun prowess. When
anti-apartheid shanties were firebombed one May 1986 night at 2AM
(one of his other students was badly burned) and then -- predictably
-- banned by JHU authorities, David led a group of faculty lobbying
for free speech rights. But no faculty member was more dedicated to
helping the student activists link to Baltimore's community and
labour movements, and an amazing alliance resulted which tackled
David's pet peeve of redlining as well as Baltimore bank loans to SA
and bank anti-union work. For that campaign, David's political
acumen was invaluable. More generally, perhaps from ennui, he's
played a laid-back role in university politics, writing a fair amount about
local problems in even the student newspaper, but certainly never
taking any trouble to build a power base. His tiny coterie of
colleagues and students at JHU now, after he returned from an Oxford
chair in 1993, testifies to how little attention he gives to the more
concrete aspects of political survival in a corporate university.
When chided about the problem of reproduction of his intellectual
support I think David redoubles his efforts to publish meaningful
arguments that engage leading social theorists. You'd get that sense
by tracking his writings from a pure (and positivist) disciplinary
study (Explanation in Geography, 1969) to a wider urban analysis
(Social Justice and the City, 1973, where he allied with Marxism) to
his rewrite of Kapital (Limits to Capital, 1982) to two other
urban books during the late 1980s where he moves from poli-econ to
social and cultural critique, to attacking postmodern work (The
Condition of Post-Modernity, 1989) to the early 1990s work on
ecology, place, feminism, difference, etc.
The irritating feature of the PEN-L discussion, as Jim pointed out, is
the reduction of David's rich attempt to revive dialectical thought (in
Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 1996) to a set of
autobiographical political citations. Louis is terribly eloquent in
articulating these points but I think he's not doing justice to the
illustrative character of those examples. Probably any engagement
with pomo social theory -- which David does, too much, since
that's what swirling around Northern academia -- has to
self-consciously locate itself in the context of the author's own
positionality. I think that explains the testimonial character of
some of the chapters, but as Louis agrees there's not
a hint of self-aggrandisement in any of this.
The problems raised, as Dennis confirmed, over whether to support a
shopfloor struggle over production of luxury automobiles carry on
much more generally to socialist strategy and tactics. I would have
been in Theresa's camp in Oxford, trying to win a battle now, simply
so as to have the capacity to come back and fight the bigger problems
another day. But that kind of persistent trade-unionism (or defense
of community or ecology, or whatever the character of the struggle you're
describing) does begin to wear, when very rarely do such activities
accumulate into a bigger movement. It's the character of the larger,
more forward-thinking movement for socialism that David has been
trying to strategise. This will necessarily bring all sorts of
conflicts to bear amongst progressive protagonists, and it's no use
denying these. Working through the militant particularisms and
building a general struggle out of this was, I felt, the general
thrust of David's new book, and Louis isn't giving this project any
credit in his haste to ridicule the petty-bourgeois character of the
1990s academic.
So Louis, put yourself in South Africa, working with the super-militant
National Union of Metalworkers of SA -- but these guys can never
bring themselves to imagine a change in production systems so that the
grotesque multi-variety luxury car assembly lines they work on just
keep churning out vehicles for the richest 3% of the population, instead
of securing state funding for a rational and humane public transport system --
and then you find that the three or four top Marxist strategists in
the union have popped over to government after 1994, and one is now
the Minister of Trade and Industry and spouts post-fordist babble to
justify neo-liberal policy -- ok, wouldn't it be important for you to sit
back a moment and try to root the trade union work in building a more
holistic, longer-term, geographically-wider sense of socialist consciousness?
Patrick
> It's funny; a professor I know here at Berkeley who studied under Harvey made
> fun of him for that fact that Harvey was too political, that Harvey spent many
> weekends with a staple gun in hand putting up posters for rallies. This
> professor, who loved radical Marxist geographic theory, was somewhat embarassed
> that his mentor actually got his hands dirty doing plebian political work,
> rather than just being a sophisticated talking head commentator.
>
> Just on that "recommendation", I've always harbored a certain admiration for
> Harvey without having met him. Anyone with tenure who still handles a staple
> gun is alright in my book :)
>
> --Nathan Newman
>
>
>
