Sam Pawlett wrote: >When reading Harvey's latest book I found all the time spent on Leibniz >and Whitehead very strange and disappointing. A bit if a red herring. >What is the point of invoking these very obscure thinkers? L&W >constructed two of the strangest metaphysical systems around. L&W were >known primarily as mathematicians and not as philosophers. Whatever >Harvey's motives, I'm sure he could have found a basis for his ideas in >more sound and less woolly philososphies. We are living through a period of intense reaction. I had Harvey's book on my shelf, but wasn't prompted to read it until a Living Marxism supporter started quoting from it to justify "Marxist" support of nuclear power plants in Europe and fox-hunting. What's up with that, I said to myself. When I read it, I was shocked by the crude "productivist" Marxism that John Bellamy Foster has answered in the pages of Monthly Review. What was always in the back of my mind, however, and which John never got into, was why Leibniz and Whitehead were important. The answer seems rather obvious now--at least to me. The dialectics of Leibniz and Whitehead have zero revolutionary content. They are not even on a par with Hegel's, who at least was grappling with the whole question of social transformation. Leibniz/Whitehead allows the Marxist intelllectual to "philosophize" about the world. To accept disasters of one sort or another as having some sort of role in the "higher dialectic". This is also why Harvey is so weak on the American Indian. The Leibniz/Whitehead dialectic dovetails with social Darwinism, which his book makes all sorts of concessions to. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
