Louis Proyect wrote: >>So there'll be no more cities in the Proyectian Utopia? >> >>Doug > >God, what low-level, baiting tripe. From a Yale graduate and Verso >best-seller, no less. That's not baiting, it's an invitation for you to expand on your argument. When you say something like... >Now you can call cities Chicago "ecosystems" just as long as it is >understood that we are committing suicide as a species while the >contradiction between city and countryside is maintained. The problem is >that these issues are not addressed by Cronon and Harvey, which I find >astonishing for people who claim to have read Marx. ....you leave someone wondering just what you mean. I haven't read Cronon, but by Peter Dorman's report, his views are a bit more complicated than you let on. I have read Harvey, and I don't know how you can claim that he is unaware of the contradictions of urbanization. You say a lot of provocative, extreme things that don't appear very fully worked out. In this case, you seem to think that once we've gotten rid of capitalism, and replaced it with socialism, then things will just take care of themselves. I've read a lot of Proyect over the years, and still have no idea what a resolution of the city-country problem would mean in your eyes. With a world population of over 6 billion, half of them urbanized, just how would you feed and house these people? Though you don't confront it, there's a lot of Dave Foremanesque rewilding hidden in your thought; at least Foreman is out front about it and openly embraces depopulation. For all your protestations of Marxism, I see a lot of what Marx saw as romantic anti-capitalism, the reactionary formation that would shadow capitalism until its overcoming. They're understandable as the fantasies of an urbanized cubicled knowledge worker - those "images of undistorted nature that arise in distortion as their opposite" - but as guidelines for politics, they're pretty sketchy. You obviously don't like Harvey's political guidelines, or what you think are Harvey's guidelines, but at least he's trying to think about how theory and practice work together. And go ahead and forward this to your list as yet another example of "the continuing regression of Doug Henwood," even though I'm not there to answer the charge.
