Patrick Bond:
> (I'm continuing this rap because on another list, Comrade Jones was
> hinting -- no, accusing -- that I've got no sense of broader crisis
> theory.
I'm deeply grateful for Patrick Bond's work as any sane person must be.
>But what is needed is a set of intermediate concepts to
> translate all these deeper, and theoretically-comprehensible, "laws
> of motion" of capitalism into the sites of immediate crisis-symptoms.
> My doctoral supervisor David Harvey uses the idea of
> a "spatio-temporal fix"--or in english, shifting and stalling
> the crisis--which I find useful. Or are such intermediate concepts,
> to link people's observations of crisis to a critique of capitalism,
> not so crucial in B.A. or London, Nestor and Mark? Just curious
> on how you tell a broader story...)
Harvey is a separate debate, probably. Harvey's Justice in the City was the first
Marxist geography/urban topography I ever read, and it must be about 30 years ago,
but the memory is still vivid. I even have the book here somewhere and considering
the good things I've *lost* in the course of my colourful life, that must mean sg.
Where I am critical of Harvey is in what I think is a misappreciation of the
relationship between ecological justice and social justice; I wish Tom Warren would
stop lurking and put in his 2 cents about here.
Let's talk about Harvey, but later, OK?
As for " intermediate concepts to > translate all these deeper, and
theoretically-comprehensible, "laws
> of motion" of capitalism into the sites of immediate crisis-symptoms", what are we
talking here, about the articulations between different levels or instances of the
sociohistorical totality and how they are imbricated etc, or are we talking about
the links in the mind's eye of the beholder? It's not 'people's observations' which
have to be linked (a project which reduces revolutionary politics to some kind of
didactic process) but the things themselves. For eg, what is the lionk between the
emergence of monetarism + neoliberalism on one hand, and emergence of impending
energy crises on another? Is the link between Ayn Rand,. Friedman, hayek etc, as
theoretical (superstructural) instances on 1 hand, and post-1073 oilshocks on the
other, contingent, fortuitous, accidental, serendipitous, in that the former
provided capitalism with needed policy adaptations in light of the latter, or is
there a deeper, hidden, but real connectedness between the emergence into the
historical light of day of particular ideas (either reactionary or progressive) and
the material process of social reproduction?
What I do not seem to see in the work of David Harvey for instance (to take just one
example, but you could extend to include Panitch, Mattick, even John Foster, IMO) is
any attempt even to engage the problem of linking up the dynamics of accumulation,
rising org. comp., over-acc. crisis etc, and the material basis of production and
the importance of energetics.
Foster is interesting becomes he comes closest in some ways, but like Engels fam,ous
asymptotic curve, he gets close but never quite gets there.
Mark
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