Patrick - I now get the Pen-L posts directly, so please don;t forward anymore! Also
you seem to send me everything twice (to 2 different email addresses maybe?). Please
just use my igc box for now.
Really enjoyed your E Cape history in the Stutterheim paper. Is that Colin Bundy? Was
that his doctorate? Do you have a copy? The history of colonial expropriation is
quite effective in putting these recent elite-partnership games into perspective. I
guess you will still sound wacko to DCD and DFID though, harping on about all those
missed opportunities. How are you going to finish the paper?
In the case of PE though, I'm not sure of your strategy. Would you rather have a
Ladbrokes casino than a Zinc Smelter? I guess it's marginally better for the planet
(notwithstanding all the intercontinental tourist flights), but for the workers and
peasants???!
Also where does all the LED analysis take us as far as the local state in SA is
concerned? I guess we have found no recent examples of radical progressive
departures by local leaders due (a) to the structural position of the local state
financially and constitutionally and (b) to the lack of political/financial
incentives for newly-coopted and enriched local politicians to break free of the
neo-liberal net. We may have to abandon the state for a while and put our efforts
into rebuilding the civics and grassroots leadership. How are relations between MZ's
work and trade union branches. Have there been any more protests against the
cut-offs?
Sarah enjoyed your Bank submission. She said that the first half was a bit of a rant,
but you backed it up with some convincing technospeak at the end.
Ben.
Patrick Bond wrote:
> 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
> >
> >
> >
