Patrick Bond wrote: >> From: Doug Henwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> Of course Johannesburg is the metropolis of one of the most polarized >> countries on earth, on the most ravaged continent on earth. Johannesburg as >> we know it is a product of an abominable set of social relations, so I >> don't know how you can make a judgment on cities themselves. It's also the >> set of social relations we've been given to deal with, the history we make >> with tools not of our own choosing. If you evoke the nonexistence of >> Johannesburg as desirable you have to say something about what should take >> its place if you don't want to be taken for Pol Pot. > >Really Doug, that's a banal conversation-stopper, not worthy of your >radical imagination. Seems more that it was a conversation starter, from your subsequent comments. I know you're not Pol Pot, Patrick, which is why I wanted you to elaborate. One has lately heard a lot of polemic about the evils of the city-country contradiction without hearing much detail, so I'm grateful for the detail you supplied in your post. Given the U.S. experience of suburbanization, with all its waste and atomization, I get a bit skeptical when I hear about "a long-term project of better spreading people and economic activity over the countryside. Speaking of Pol Pot and idealist philosophies, here's an excerpt from Slavoj Zizek's Tarrying With The Negative: "Prior to becoming a revolutionary, Pol Pot was a professor at a French lycée in Phnom Penh, known for his subtle readings of Rimbaud and Mallarmé. Abimael Guzman, 'presidente Gonzalo,' the leader of the Senderistas, is a philosophy professor whose preferred authors are Hegel and Heidegger and whose doctoral thesis was on Kant's theory of space." Doug
